Pro Audio on a Budget: Record and Edit Great Audio, Anywhere | Uroš Maravić | Skillshare
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Pro Audio on a Budget: Record and Edit Great Audio, Anywhere

teacher avatar Uroš Maravić, Videographer & Music producer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      2:10

    • 2.

      Project

      1:13

    • 3.

      How to Get a Clean Recording

      7:10

    • 4.

      Recording Equipment

      13:39

    • 5.

      Lavalier Microphones

      8:07

    • 6.

      Shotgun & Pencil Microphones

      2:57

    • 7.

      Studio Microphones

      3:07

    • 8.

      Syncing Audio

      8:33

    • 9.

      Gear Talk

      10:33

    • 10.

      Audio Editing: Noise Reduction

      13:18

    • 11.

      Audio Editing: EQ & De Esser

      19:41

    • 12.

      Audio Editing: Compression

      11:17

    • 13.

      Thank you

      0:42

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About This Class

When you're starting out in video production, audio equipment, and techniques often go overlooked. But, good audio is essential for any video. 

A low-quality video is watchable if you have exceptional audio, but a great-looking video with bad, unintelligible audio will just get skipped.

In this class, I wanted to distill 10 years of my knowledge working with audio as both a music producer and videographer into a compact class, that will get you up and running with audio equipment, and enable you to achieve great sound, no matter where you are and what gear you possess.

In this class we'll talk about:

  • What creates noise in recordings, and how to avoid the most common sources
  • How to properly set up your recording equipment
  • Different types of microphones and how to place them
  • How to sync your audio
  • Different types of audio setups, starting from zero dollars
  • How to apply noise reduction, and balance the dynamics and the frequencies of your recording.

I'll be using Premiere Pro for editing my audio, but the techniques I describe are universal and can be used in any editing software.

I hope you enjoy this class, and have as much fun watching it, as I did making it.

Fun fact: I made the background music for this class, so I'm proud of that too.

If you liked the class, and want to learn more about audio, here are some of my favorite youtube channels that are focused on audio:

https://www.youtube.com/@Podcastage

https://www.youtube.com/@curtisjudd

https://www.youtube.com/@DeityMicrophones

Meet Your Teacher

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Uroš Maravić

Videographer & Music producer

Teacher

Hi, I'm Uroš. I also go by Umcaruje on various places on the internet. I'm a videographer and music producer from Belgrade, Serbia.

I might look new, but I've been behind the scenes of Skillshare for some time now. For two years, I've been shooting and editing classes from my sister Di Ujdi, who is a Top Teacher here on Skillshare. I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with all of you, so I can help you out with your projects :)

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Bad audio will kill your video seriously. People say that audio is 50% of your video, but I would argue that sometimes it's even more. A low quality video is watchable if you have exceptional audio on it. But a great looking videos, with bad unintelligible audio will just get skipped. I want to help you avoid bad audio no matter what gear you possess or what your budget is. Hi, my name is Josh and I'm a videographer and music producer based in Belgrade, Serbia. I have been making music and working with sound for over 10 years. For the past three years, I've been shooting and editing Skillshare classes by my sister [inaudible]. We have made over 17 classes, eight of which were awarded the staff pick. I was fortunate to use my background in audio production to ensure that each class we made had clear, understandable audio, even though we didn't possess the best equipment when we started up. From hiding microphones in plain sight to removing noise from the fan of the cheap lights we were using, I've had my fair share of difficult audio situations. In this class, I want to help you improve your audio recordings using the equipment you already have, even if all you have is a phone. We'll go through some practical tips on how to reduce noise in your room. I'll explain to you how to record using different types of microphones, and I want to get you up and running, even if you're a complete beginner, so we'll go through all the steps you need to get a crystal-clear recording. I'll also show you my step-by-step process to edit your raw audio. We'll learn about noise reduction, EQ, and compression, and how to give our recordings the professional shine. We'll go through a couple of different setups at different price points starting from $0 because I want to show you that you can really improve your audio in any situation you're in. I'm very excited to teach you all this, so let's get started. 2. Project: For the project for this class, I want you to sit in front of a camera and tell me what your favorite movies are. What would be great is that you go ahead and record this before watching the rest of the class. This will allow you to compare your results before and after you apply the techniques we discussed in this class. For my base recording, I'll just use my camera microphone in a regular room in my flat, since that is what many beginners would do. Hi, my name is Kourosh, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Once you're done with the class, you can record your sound bite again, this time using the recording techniques we discussed. Afterwards, you can use any program to edit your audio. I will be using Premier Pro from my examples, but these techniques are universal and the effects I will use are available in most modern audio and video editing programs. When you are done, put your recordings in the class project. I would love to hear about your improvements. When you're ready, just click on the "Create Project" button and share with us your results. I can't wait to see what you come up with. 3. How to Get a Clean Recording: First things first, the Number 1 piece of advice I have for you is don't use your built-in camera microphone. In 90% of situations, it will sound terrible because first of all, most built-in camera microphones are of bad quality. They sound thin, they pickup handling noise from your camera or the out-of-focus motors, even if your camera microphone is good. The second reason why you shouldn't use it is that when you're recording a lot of the time the camera is far away from you. The thing about sound is that it drops in level a lot. When you double the distance between you and the microphone, the sound level drops four times, and this can add up quickly. When your microphone is far away from you, it will record a lot less of your voice and a lot more noise. That's what all bad audio recordings have in common, noise. When I went to my audio engineering classes, we defined noise is any unwanted sound. When you're recording an interview or a talking head, all you want to hear is your subject's voice. That's our main objective, that the vocal we're recording is as loud as possible and everything else, the unwanted noise is as quiet as possible. Now, if your camera doesn't have a microphone input, what do you use? This is something we'll talk about later in the class because you will need an external recorder, but that recorder is probably already in your pocket. The first thing I wanted to talk to you about is the most common sources of noise you can find, and how to properly set up your recording equipment to get the best recordings. [NOISE] When you walk into a room where you're going to record, I just want you to stop and listen. Chances are your room isn't going to be absolutely quiet. You could hear outside traffic, a noisy fridge, neighbors doing some construction or playing loud music. These are all things that could be picked up by your microphone and could distract your viewer from your voice. You should try to mitigate this noise right at the source. If you live in an area with a lot of traffic, completely close your windows to make the room quieter. If you have a neighbor playing loud music, knock on their door and ask them to turn it down for a couple of hours because you're filming. Noisy appliances should be switched off if possible or doors closed around them to make them quieter. If you don't have doors and the appliance needs to stay on, you could hang some heavy blankets around it to block the sound. This all might seem a bit excessive, but trust me, you don't want to be running heavy noise reduction, and degrading your recording and post, if the solution was as simple as closing a door or a window. Try to fix it at the source. This will help you a lot in the long run. [NOISE] The next thing I want to talk about is the sound your room makes. You've probably noticed that different spaces sound different. If you go to an empty large hall and clap, [NOISE] you will notice the sound in there will linger for some time before it becomes quiet again. This is called reverberation. It's the persistence of sound in space. Now, reverberation is a natural occurrence, and it happens when the sound bounces around and gets reflected by the surfaces in the room. Flat, hard surfaces like walls or wood or glass reflect and bounce back a lot of the sound coming at them while things like furniture, blankets, and clothes absorb sound. When you are in a specific space, look around and notice what items are on the walls and the floors. A bare room with parallel walls will usually sound terrible. The sound in it will linger for a longer time. But another thing you should notice is that the room also rings. I'm here, this is the smallest room in my flat, and as you can see, it's mostly bare walls and it sounds terrible. Listen to this. [NOISE] Ringing is what happens when you have two hard surfaces that are perfectly parallel. The sound will bounce from one wall to the other wall, and it will keep doing this. But a certain frequency will get amplified because it is exactly the length of a wall, resulting in resonances or ringing. The problem is, since the human voice occupies a wide space in the frequency spectrum, your voice can trigger those frequencies, and your recording suddenly sounds muddy. How do you fix this though? How do you cut down on the reverb in your recording? How do you fix room resonances? When you're recording, try to be around the center of the room. If you're too close to a wall, this can make these effects exaggerated. The single biggest thing you can do to mitigate your room reverb is to get your microphone closer to you. When your microphone is close, it picks up a lot more of the direct sound from your mouth, which is louder than the reflected sound from the room. In turn, when your voice is louder, you can turn down the volume of your microphone, and you can get a cleaner recording because the room noise will become quieter. You can also try to reduce the reverberation of your room. The easiest way to make a room sound more dead is to strategically fill it up with stuff. Bare parallel walls are the enemy of a pleasant sound, especially in a smaller room. For example, bookshelves are great for sound because their surface is uneven. Even though most of it is hard, it will scatter the sound around, making it more pleasant. Couches, beds, and blankets all absorb sound. One idea is to put some moving blankets, some stands in front of you to absorb your voice before it hits the walls. Putting a thick carpet on your floor can also help. If you are savvy, you could fashion yourself sound panels from Rockwell, which is the best professional solution, because these panels are thick, and absorb a lot more of lower frequencies, and do it more efficiently than household items. But in a pinch, hanging a thick blanket in front of you is a whole lot better than having nothing. Your first instinct might be to put the blanket or a sound panel directly on the wall, but you will get a much better result if it has a gap. Why? Because the sound goes through the blanket, bounces from the wall, and then gets absorbed again, if you have a gap, making it much more efficient. 4. Recording Equipment: Now you've listened to your room, heard potential problems and solved them. But how do you record your audio? First, you need a microphone and you need something to record your microphone with, a recorder. I'll talk about different types of microphones later in the class, but you need to understand that you can plug any microphone into any recorder. We could break down microphones into two common categories, microphones with the XLR connector and microphones with the 3.5 millimeter jack. The XLR connector is a standard in the audio industry, and it's most commonly found in professional microphones from studio microphones and handheld microphones used in live shows, to shotgun microphones used in the film industry. Most of our consumer grade electronics like cameras, phones, laptops, and PCs, have a microphone input, but it's not an XLR one. If you plan on using a microphone that has an XLR connector, you're going to need something to plug it in. This can either be a portable recorder with an XLR input or an external audio interface for your computer. A portable recorder is great because it's battery operated and you can take it anywhere, but these can get expensive. A decent USB audio interface can cost around a $100 and it can be really versatile. But then you also need a computer to act as the recorder for your sound. This can be any Mac or PC. Whatever you do, avoid those dirt cheap XLR to USB cables or XLR to 3.5 millimeter cables. These work really poorly or don't work at all, and I wouldn't waste your money. Now that some XLR microphones require power, this is called phantom power, and it's most commonly needed by condenser microphones. If you own or plan on owning a condenser microphone, check if it requires phantom power and when shopping for an interface or a recorder, make sure that it has phantom power. This is standard on many interfaces, but the really cheap ones can skip out on this feature. Also, if you plug in your microphone in your interface and you hear no sound, check if your phantom power is turned on. This is usually a switch or a button labeled 48V for 48 volts, which is the voltage the phantom power provides. Now, the 3.5 millimeter jack is something that you are probably a lot more familiar with. Almost every computer has a 3.5 millimeter audio jack. You plug your headphones into it. On older computers, cameras and portable recorders, you can see a dedicated 3.5 millimeter microphone input, while modern phones and laptops have a combined one. What's the difference? Regular 3.5 millimeter jacks have three sections, a tip, ring, and the sleeve. Combined headphone jacks have an additional ring, so it has four sections, a tip, a ring, another ring, and the sleeve. The added sleeve is what carries the microphone signal. The problem with these is they don't mix and match. So for example, when a microphone has a standard TRS jack, it carries the microphone signal on both the tip and the ring. If you plug that into your phone, you would get no sound. Conversely, if your microphone is meant just for phones and ends in the TRRS jack, if you plug it into your computer or a portable recorder with a 3.5 millimeter input, you would get no sound. Fortunately, a lot of microphones with TRRS jacks have a dedicated switch to switch from regular to smartphone mode. If they have a TRS jack, they come with an adapter that allows you to convert between the two standards, or you could buy it separately. The 3.5 millimeter jack is great and microphones using it are a lot more budget friendly, though the connector itself isn't as strong and as secure as XLR. You can find the 3.5 millimeter input in a lot of devices, but be prepared for it to sound worse on some. PC motherboards, for example, can introduce more noise in your recording when compared to something like a Zoom H1, which is a dedicated recorder with a 3.5 millimeter jack. They're also microphone recorder combos. Your phone is an example of one. It has a built-in microphone, and you can also input the microphone signal into it using the headphone jack. There are also various portable recorders with built-in microphones on the market for different purposes. These are very compelling for beginners. For example, there are field recorders which have two microphones for stereo recording, like the Zoom H1, Zoom H4n or the Tascam DR-40. These are more suited for sound effects recording than dialogue, but they will work for dialogue too. There are also lavalier microphones attached to a recorder like the Zoom F2 or the Tascam DR-10L. In my opinion, this is a great option for beginners because it takes the confusion and the anxiety of mismatching your microphone to your recorder out of the equation. So you have a recorder, your microphone is connected and now we can get to recording. [NOISE] The first thing we want to decide when setting up our recorder is if we're going to record in compressed or in uncompressed format. Compressed formats like MP3 are great if you're low on space or you plan to record for hours because they keep your file sizes low. If you're recording in MP3, always use the highest bit rate. What is bit rate? Its a quality setting, and it represents the maximum amount of data per second that can be captured. We want the maximum amount of data we can get. For MP3, that setting is 320 kilobytes per second. Recording uncompressed audio is the best because you will retain a lot more data, which is useful when editing the audio later on. This means recording in the WAV format. Here you have two settings, bit depth and sample rate. What is the sample rate? It's how many times in a second your recorder takes measurements of the incoming signal to convert it into a digital format. This determines the highest possible frequency your recorder can record. I recommend using a sample rate of 40,000 hertz. This is the standard in the video world. There's really no need to go higher than that, especially when you're recording just vocals. The bit depth determines the overall dynamic range of your recording, which determines how quiet or how loud of a sound can actually be recorded into the digital file. On most recorders, you can pick between 16-bit and 24-bit. I would pick 24 bit if it's available. What this means, is you can increase the volume more in post-production if your recording was a little quiet and you will get a result that has fewer artifacts than if you were recording in 16 bit. [NOISE]. We have picked our recording format, but now we need to set our gain. What is gain? It's the input volume of your microphone and this is measured in decibels. Decibels are a measurement of loudness and one decibel is around the smallest change in sound level we humans can perceive. What can be confusing about decibels is that they are a relative unit, meaning there is not one universal decibel in audio. If you measure the loudness of sounds like in a concert or speakers, these are decibels of sound pressure level. These go from zero decibels and up. If you're just recording vocals, you don't need to worry about them. The decibels we need to look after are in the digital audio realm. These are dBFS or decibels of full-scale. This is a scale that goes from minus infinity, which is absolute silence to zero. This zero is very important because if your sound ever crosses the zero while recording, you could lose information, Here sound will distort, which is also known as clipping. The idea of setting a proper gain is to ensure your sound doesn't distort or clip. Easy, you would say, I can just turn down my gain a lot and I will never clip. The problem there again is noise. All audio recorders have a certain amount of noise they always produce. Now, this is quite low in terms of level, but what happens when you turn your gain too low is that you'll need to turn up the volume of your sound in post-production. All the noise from the recorder will get turned up as well, increasing the overall level of noise. How do you set up a proper gain? You do a sound test. Before recording, set up your microphone and ask your subject to talk, like we're recording. You should turn up your gain up or down until the highest peaks of the audio hit around -12 decibels. If you don't have exact numbers, like on a mobile app, this is usually the color green. Now, if you're recording by yourself, to make sure you won't clip, try being a bit louder than normal and look at the meter. It should be around -6 or -3 decibels. If it clips and goes over zero, turn your gain down. Congratulations, you have set up a proper gain. Here's a practical demonstration of me setting up my gain on the Zoom H1. Here's a practical demonstration on how I set my gain on the Zoom H1 hand recorder. As you can see, we're currently pretty low in level. My voice is hitting just about -24 decibels, and we want that to be higher. At the side, these are my gain controls. Because I'm too quiet, I'll just start turning up my gain. We're turning up the gain, maybe around 50, 58. As you can see now, when I'm talking, my voice is hitting around -12, which is the proper gain. If I go over it, see what happens. So we'll just start raising the level even more. Now I'm at around 80 and you see if I'm talking quietly, it doesn't still go over the zero. But the moment I start being louder, you can see it hitting zero and distorting. This is what we want to avoid. I'll just turn down my gain and talk again. As you can see, we're hitting the -12. Now, if I go and be louder, hi, my name is Uros, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival, I still didn't hit the zero. So this is my gain set and I'm ready to record. Now, all of this might look complicated, especially when doing it for the first time and you could be tempted to just let your device automatically set the gain. But let me show you why it's a bad idea. This is my Zoom H1 recorder, and now I'm going to set it to auto level. [NOISE] There's the button and let's turn on the auto level. [NOISE] You might have noticed that everything got really loud all of a sudden. If I start raising my voice and talking normally, it gets quieter. If I get even louder, it gets even quieter. But listen to what happens the minute I stop talking. The noise gets turned up. This is why it's a really bad idea to use auto gain because you can't fix this in post-production. It's really hard. All of these gains settings apply to traditional 16 or 24 bit recorders. But lately, there have been a couple of recorders that hit the market that have 32-bit recording. Thirty two-bit audio does not have a limit at zero decibels, which means that these devices effectively don't need to set gain. If you own one of these devices, you just press record and that's it. 5. Lavalier Microphones: Now let's talk about lavalier microphones or lapel microphones, which is their other name. These are really common and useful for several reasons. They are affordable. You can get a decent lavalier mic for a good price. The other thing is, they are attached to your subject. So you don't have to worry about stands or you don't need someone to move your microphone if your subject moves in the frame. The other thing is, they are small. So if they are visible in your shot, it's not a big deal and you can get away with it. I use a lavalier microphone most of the time for my classes and projects. There are also some cons involved with them. Most lavaliers are omnidirectional. This means that no matter how you orient it, it will pick up the same sound. This little lavalier microphone is omnidirectional, and what this means is that I can move it around and the sound will stay the same. So I can orient it anyway that I want and it will still pick up the sound the same. This dynamic microphone is directional and what this means is that it will pick up the sound just from the front. As soon as I start rotating it, you can see how my voice gets a lot more quiet and as I get back to the front, it starts sounding normal again. There are also directional lavalier microphones on the market, but these need to be carefully positioned because their sound level drops a lot faster when they're further away from you. I wouldn't call them beginner-friendly. Because the lavalier microphone is omnidirectional, if you are in a room with a lot of reverberation, it will pick up a lot of your room. But with proper positioning, we can still get a clean sound out of it. What's the best place to put your lav mic? It's the middle of your chest or slightly higher, if you need to. You shouldn't go lower than this spot. This is an ideal spot because it will pick up direct sound from your mouth and give you some nice low-end from your chest, so you get a rounded sound. How do you put the microphone there? The easiest way to mount your lavalier mic is by using the clip that comes with it. Choice of clothing is very helpful here as shirts and jackets allow you to mount the microphone in the ideal spot. If you have a T-shirt, mounting the lavalier on the color will make it too close to your throat, which can give you an unnatural sound. Lavaliers can also be hidden. You can take them directly on your body or you can tape them to the inside of shirts. The most common tape used for this is medical tape or you can use moleskin. There are also foam wedges that you put your microphone in to avoid clothes rustling. Keep in mind that these are really meant for more expensive microphone and budget ones are more sensitive when mounted under your shirt. Again, wardrobe choice here is king. When preparing for this class, I actually changed up my shirt because the material was really noisy. It wasn't rubbing on the lavalier mic, but me moving my hands just made it rustle and it could be picked up by the microphone. Here are a few practical ways to conceal a lav mic. I'm going to show you two techniques for taping and concealing a lavalier mic. The first one is called the sandwich method, which can be used to tape your microphone directly to your body. You can use medical tape like I have here or you can use moleskin, but the process stays the same. First of all, I'm going to cut up a strip of my medical tape, around this big, and then I'm going to place it on some parchment paper or wax paper and this is so that the tape doesn't stick to anything. Cut up our medical tape and just place it on the parchment paper. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the clip from a lavalier microphone because this is what we need. I'll put the windscreen back on just in case and then you just place it on top of the medical tape. Then you take another strip of medical tape. This one should be a bit shorter than the one we have here and you just place it over the microphone like so. Now you have a sandwich. You can use this sandwich to put your lavalier anywhere on your body or even on the inside of jackets. This is the method I used for my sister's latest class. The microphone was just taped to her body and you can see on the frame where the microphone is hidden. Since her shirt was open, we didn't have to worry about it rustling over the microphone and we got perfectly clear audio. The second method is called the encapsulation method and it's much more useful when sticking your microphone to shirts or jackets. You start by making these little triangle pills from tape. You just take the tape and then fold it over in a triangle, sticky side out, and then once you fold it over the triangle, just fold it over itself, so it sticks. Then you should repeat that maybe two or three times like this. Then you just cut the tape and you're left with this little triangle pillow. Then on this triangle pillow, you just place your microphone on one side, and then you make another pillow. Let's do it again. Make a triangle. Fold it over itself, fold again, fold one more time, and cut. Then when you have another one of these, you just put it over your microphone and as you can see, it's now completely encapsulated. You can use this to mount it inside of button up shirts and here you can see how I'm mounting it to my shirt. I also use some medical tape to stick the cable to the inside of the shirt so it keeps it more secure. Another thing you should be adding to your lavalier cables is something called strain relief. You just go and make a loop and then you get a piece of tape once you've made that loop [NOISE] and you just sticky side out, you just tape this loop together and this will provide you strain relief. If your lavalier microphone is mounted up here and you pull on it, this happens. It allows the cable to move freely and it doesn't tug on it. You can tape this to the inside of your shirt if you need it to be more secure. 6. Shotgun & Pencil Microphones: Shotgun microphones and pencil microphones are another popular category. They're used in movies as main mics, while lab mics are used as backups. In recent years, there has also been a surge of on-camera shotgun microphones, which are a great choice for vloggers. So what are shotgun and pencil microphones? They are directional-powered microfilms. These microphones pick-up sound that is right in front of them and reject the sound that comes from the microphone at the side. How much sound they pick-up and reject depends on their polar pattern. A polar pattern is a visual representation of how much sound the microphone picks up around itself. You have less directional patterns, like the cardioid one, or really directional ones like this shotgun polar pattern. Here lies the distinction between pencil and shotgun microphones. Shotgun mics are by their nature, a lot more directional. This directionality reduces the pickup of any sounds that are not on axis of the microphone, but the drawback is that your voice starts sounding unnatural. This is why pencil microphones can be used in indoor dialogue where it's less noisy, while directional shotgun microphones are more beneficial outdoors or in rooms with more reverb. These microphones come both in an XLR form or as 3.5-millimeter mics. They're usually meant to be mounted on cameras. For the XLR versions, you'll need phantom power, while the 3.5-millimeter versions are usually battery-powered. How do you place a shotgun microphone? The idea here is to be as close as possible while being out of your frame. These microphones are usually positioned over your subject, and you want the microphone to be at an angle and pointing to the space between your mouth and the upper chest. If there is a lot of space above your head in the frame, you could also place the microphone from under the frame pointing at the same spot. Now, if you have one of these on-camera microphones, they work really great for vlogging or anywhere where the subject is close to the camera. But if you want to record a talking head, you run into the same problem as using the built-in camera mic. The way to get good sound from them is to actually take them off the camera and put them on a stand. They do have very short cables, so you'll either need to buy a 3.5-millimeter to 3.5-millimeter extender cable, or you could record them into an external recorder. The positioning is the same, just out of your frame, pointing at the space between your mouth and the chest. For this class, I'm actually using my SC7 pencil microphone, which is an XLR microphone with a cardioid polar pattern. 7. Studio Microphones: The last category we're going to talk about is what I call studio microphones. These are not really meant to be concealed in the frame because they are meant for voice-overs and recording singing or instruments. These mics are mostly XLR microphones, or you have USB versions which just have an audio interface built into them. The two most common studio mics are dynamic microphones and large diaphragm condenser microphones. Dynamic microphones are known for their durability and are generally less sensitive to really fine details in the sound, which makes them great if you need to get a clean recording in a regular room because they will pick up less of it. Here's how a dynamic studio mic sounds. This is an AKG D5, one of my favorite microphones. This is the AKG D5 dynamic microphone, and here's how it sounds. Hi, my name is Uros and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Dynamic microphones are also incredibly popular in podcasts. Also by their nature, they don't require power, so they can be used in any audio interface. Note, that these really do drop a lot in audio level when you're further away from them. Dynamic microphones aren't the kind of microphones to boom over your subjects. Large diaphragm studio condensers are probably what comes to mind when I say studio microphone. These are microphones that have that shiny top end clarity, they make your voice sound expensive, they are stable for voice-over work and professional recording, but because they are really detailed, the benefits of being in a properly treated studio room can make these mic shine. Here's an example of a studio condenser microphone, the Audio-Technica AT2020. This is the Audio-Technica AT2020 studio microphone and this is how it sounds. Hi, my name is Uros and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Notice how much more of the room it picked up compared to the dynamic microphone and this is because I just used the AT2020 in my untreated room at home. There are also USB condenser microphones like the Blue, which are really popular for voice-over. The reasons why I don't recommend these to my friends are these. First of all, when you buy a USB microphone, there is no upgrade path. If you buy a dedicated audio interface and a dedicated microphone, later down the line, when you need something better, you can just upgrade your microphone and keep the interface. The costs at the beginning might be a bit higher, but later on, you can get a lot more out of your purchase. The second reason is that these USB mics are mostly condenser ones and beginners, in my opinion, will benefit a lot more from using the dynamic microphone because they really do pick up the room less and you get a better sound out of them. 8. Syncing Audio: When you record externally, the audio files will be separate from your video files. This means that in editing, you will want to replace the audio of your built-in camera microphone with the sound from your external recorder. You want the sound to match perfectly to your image so as to avoid the Kung Fu effect of mismatched audio and video. For this purpose, all you need to do is clap, seriously. Clapping will register as a line in your audio waveform. This will make it a breeze to sync the audio. If your camera by chance doesn't have a microphone, makes sure you clap in the frame, when editing. Then you can match the frame where your hands first close to the clap line in your waveform. A good idea is also to say, watch your recording and what take it is. If you're working with a multitude of clips, in the film industry, they use special tools for this called clapper boards. Most editing programs have the ability to automatically synchronize your video and audio, but it's important to know how to do it manually because the automatic process sometimes gets it wrong. Here's a practical demonstration of how to sync in Premiere Pro. So here we are in Premiere Pro, and I just imported my camera recording and my external recording. As you can see, they're completely out of sync. Here is my nobody. We need to fix that. The easiest way to fix this in Premiere Pro is to select both clips, right-click and press "Synchronize". Select audio and press "Okay" Premiere has done its magic. Here is my nobody. The tracks are in sync and aligned. But what if Premiere doesn't work? Sometimes it can pick up the sync because the audio is too quiet, or it gets confused and the sync is off by a frame, or two. That's why you need to learn how to do this manually. Let's put back the actual audio recording. As you can see, I'm doing this visually. Here is my clap, in the camera audio, and here is my clap in the external audio. What I want to do is just move it around until they get in the same proximity and zoom in and move the external audio tracks so it matches. The easy way to do this is by pressing Alt on your keyboard and using the arrow keys to move left and right. Now as you can see these claps are almost perfectly aligned, but if I move it one frame over here, it's too far left. If I move it another frame, it's too far right. The way to fix this is by clicking here and selecting show audio time units. What this allows you to do is to zoom in even further and move your waveform until it looks perfect. Whenever you sync, you should check the beginning of the file and the end of the file. If you don't even have a selfie stick, you can put your iPhone on. That sounds perfect to me. Once we're done, we can disable showing the audio time units because it's easier to edit that way. What I like to do is actually unlink my camera audio. I just right-click and click "Unlink" and then take my video and my external audio and link them. What I've done here is I basically made sure that my video and my external audio will never go out of sync. We can just remove this, god awful, camera audio. Here is my no budget setup. I just use the share. But let's say that you haven't clapped. Let's say you forgot to clap and your clips look something like this. I just started talking. Here is my, no budget setup. The principle here is the same. I'm looking for something sharp that has happened in my speech, maybe like that, that sneeze right there. It's sharp. I can see it has the wave form and I can see it on an external audio. The principle is the same. You just move it until it matches. The trick is to listen to both the camera and the external audio. If they are in sync, they will sound good. They will sound like one sound source. Listen to this. Here's my no budget setup, in a true no budget fashion. Listen to what happens if the external audio is off by a frame. Here's my no budget setup in a true no budget fashion. You can see how it sounds doubled. Sometimes this can also sound like some frequencies are missing, like the sound is hollow. This is because the wave forms aren't matching perfectly and they're canceling each other out. But if you have a good sync like this. Here's my no budget set up in a true no budget fashion. Everything sounds natural. Also, you might notice that when you record for a longer time, like an hour, or maybe half an hour, the audio might get out of sync with the video for a couple of frames. This happens because your recorder and your camera have an internal clock when recording audio. These clocks might be off by a millionth of a second. This isn't a problem on shorter durations, but the longer ones, this difference multiplies and you get this problem that is called sync drift. If this happens to you, don't panic. It's really simple to fix in Premiere Pro. Here we have an example of sync drift. This is a segment of my class that I recorded, which is around 30 minutes long. As you can see in the beginning. The audio is perfectly in sync. You can see at the end that it got way out of sync. Using the sample rate of 48,000 Hertz. This is standard in the video world. Now, the way to fix this is extremely simple. You go to the last usable word, for me, I had something more here but it didn't matter, but this is the last usable words, it's but, I also cut the audio because anything later on I just won't use, then you go and press R on your keyboard, for the Rate Stretch tool. You can also find it here and you just start moving it until the wave-forms match. You can also do the hearing tests. For example, if I stretch it too much, it would sound like this and If I stretched it to level, it will sound like this. The idea is to just move it until it sounds perfect. As you can see, we have fixed the sync drift, listen to this. What this means is, you can increase the volume more in post-production. Determines the overall dynamic range of your recording, which determines how quiet. That's it. That's how you fix sync drift. It's three clicks basically, if you're worried about the pitch of your voice being altered, keep in mind that this is 99.99999%. This change in patches, basically imperceptible to our ears. 9. Gear Talk: Let's talk about gear. All this audio equipment must sound expensive, but I prepared a couple of scenarios for you so that you can see, you can get better audio with any budget. First off, let's listen to our base example where I just use my built-in camera mic in a typical beginner setup. This is what I would consider a pretty basic setup. We have my Sony flip out LCD camera just on my tripod and now you will hear the sound from it's built-in microphone. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. As you can hear, we can do a lot better than that and now let's draw the iPhone. For the first example, I just used my phone. Our phones these days do have decent microphones and if you get it close enough, you'll get a much better sound than the built-in mic of your camera. I used the Rose reporter app on my phone, which allows me to set my gain manually. Here is my no budget setup. I just use the chair and the selfie stick and I tape them together to make a stand and then I placed my iPhone, see, just outside of the frame. When I zoom in, you can't see the iPhone and this is how that sounds. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's how the iPhone sounds edited and cleaned up. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. If you have $20, there is an excellent value microphone you can pick up and it's called the Boya BY M1. This is a 3.5 millimeter microphone that can be plugged in both phones, and cameras and recorders, and for $20 I think it's an excellent value. Here's the Boya mic, plugged directly into my iPhone. This is the Boya BY M1 microphone and it was set around $20. This is how it sounds when it's running into my iPhone using the headphone jack adapter. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's the Boya BY M1, plugged into a more traditional recorder like the Zoom H1. This is the Boya BY M1 that's plugged into the Zoom H1 portable recorder and this is how it sounds. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's how the Boya BY M1 sounds when edited and cleaned up. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I think this is an incredible value and if $20 is all you can spare, this is a great option. The Zoom H1 is a longtime film making budget option. I have the older version, but the new one can be had for the same price, which is around $100. You already heard how it pairs with the budget level here from earlier and the reason why I would pick the Zoom H1 over the iPhone is that it's more robust and stable. The battery lasts longer and it has a proper level read out for setting your gain. The built-in microphones on this recorder are more suited for sound effects recording, but it can work for dialogue as well as they are of high-quality. Here's the Zoom H1 combined with a stellar technique, I call hiding the microphone in plain sight. So if you're further away from the camera, like I am right now, there's a really simple way to conceal microphones in plain sight, because this is the Zoom H1, and it's been here the whole time. The key to this is really simple. When you're recording and you're done, you just take the microphone out of the frame, like this. This is how you do the invisible microphone shot inside of Premier Pro, but this can be done in any other editing program. The key here is that you need to have a non-moving background behind your microphone. You could also probably make it work with some a moving background, but it would be a lot harder. Here, I just have my computer screen with a fixed image so it's not moving at all. Like I am right now and you don't have. You can see that I'm not interfering with the microphone in any way. There's a clear line right here that I'm just not crossing in the video ever. Here's a critical moment. I'll just mark it right here so that when we do our mask, I keep my fingers. The idea is when I started recording, I just went and removed the microphone from the shot. Then I sat back down. The autofocus is on me and let's use this shot right here for our replacement background. I'll just cut it. Cut a portion of it, remove the audio, and bring it over my footage. What I want to do right here is I want to add a frame hold. What a frame hold allows me to do is to basically freeze the entire frame all over my recording. The next thing you want to do is go to the effect controls and under opacity, you go to a free draw bezier, and you just start drawing a rough shape of your microphone where it was. Once you're done with the shape, you can see that microphone is not there anymore. Now, let's go back to our problematic spot right here. As you can see, my fingers are cut off. I'll just zoom into 100% and now just start moving my mask so I cut off the microphone and not cut off my fingers. If there was a lighting change, what I would suggest is that you go here to the mask feather control and just increase it a bit. This will give you a smoother transition and let's go back. Looking at their whole frame. It's been here the whole time. As you can see, the microphone, is just gone. Easy as that. There you go. You have a concealed microphone in your shot and this is a really good technique. I used it a couple of times on my sister's classes. Here's how the Zoom H1 sounds when edited and cleaned up. [NOISE] There you go. You have a concealed microphone in your shot. This is a really good technique, and I used it a couple of times on my sister's classes. At $200, we can really get some great options. The first one I wanted to talk to you about is the Tascam DR 10L portable recorder with the Lavaliar. This has been my love of choice for some time now because the battery lasts forever, it's small, and the mic is of very high-quality and here's how it sounds. Now you're listening to the Tascam DR 10L recorder/microphone. It's been hidden right here, see, under my shirts and this is how it sounds. Hi, my name is Urish, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's how the Tascam DR 10L sounds when edited and cleaned up. Hi, My name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. For around $200, you can also get a decent pencil microphone setup. I own the SE7, which can set you around the $100. If you combine it with an inexpensive audio interface from focus, right or the end, SSL or native instruments, you get a pretty nice package for recording in the dialogue. Here's the SE7 running into my audience, EVO 4 interface. This is the SE7 small condenser microphone, and I have boomed it just right outside of my frame and this is how it sounds. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's how the SE7 sounds, edited and cleaned up. Hi, my name is Urish and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Note that these are just example setups and not reviews, and absolute recommendations. This is just what I use and what works for me and my purposes. You might have noticed that I didn't put any on-camera shotgun microphones in my setups. That's because I don't own one. I'm not big on vlogging and my cameras don't have a separate microphone input, so I never needed one. For $200 you could definitely pick up a decent microphone from Rode, DET or taxter. If your camera doesn't have a mic input, a Zoom H1 can even fit in the $200 budget as an external recorder. If you would like to hear how many of these microphones sound before buying them, there are some amazing resources online. Youtubers like Curtis Judd or Podcastage are amazing sources of gear reviews and I highly recommend checking out if the particular microphone you want to buy has been tested by them. 10. Audio Editing: Noise Reduction: After recording, it's time to edit our audio. Basically, all sounds you have heard in television or films has been edited in some way or shape or form. That's because even if you have a perfect recording, there's still a need to edit your audio. Maybe your gain was a bit off, or maybe you used the cheap microphone and there is some noise you want to get rid of, or maybe the microphone wasn't at the perfect position and your voice sounds a bit off. Maybe it's a bit muddy or maybe it's a bit harsh. We can fix all these problems with editing. There are three steps to audio editing. The first one is noise reduction, the second one is fixing up your frequencies, and the third one is fixing up your dynamics. I think noise reduction and dynamics are pretty easy to understand for a beginner because noise, as we said, is any unwanted sound, and dynamics are just how loud or quiet the sound is. But what are frequencies? Let's talk about them. All sound is, is air particles oscillating around you and moving around. We as humans can hear these oscillations. Humans can hear from 20 hertz, which is 20 oscillations per second, to 20,000 hertz, which is 20,000 oscillations per second. In the beginning of this frequency range, we have the low frequencies, which are also known as base, and this is where the body of your voice is. In the middle frequencies, we have the tone of your voice, which is what makes your vocal unique. In the end of the frequency range, we have the higher frequencies, which are just the air of your voice and the S sounds, also known as sibilance. Now notice that when I talked about our voice, I didn't say it's just one frequency. That's because most sounds are complex and they are made up of many frequencies and these frequencies have different loudness. The thing is, our brain perceives all these different frequencies together as one sound. Let's talk about noise reduction. I'll be using Premiere Pro to edit all my audio, but these steps are repeatable in any other program. I just want to say that all the examples of editing you have heard so far have been edited using built-in Premiere Pro plugins and the free de-noising plugin that I'm going to show you. So here we are in Premiere Pro and this is an example project I set up for you. It's just me recording my audio with my iPhone outside of the frame. So let's listen first to how the built-in microphone sounds. Hi, my name is Rush, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Yikes. This is the sound from our iPhone. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. It's cool, but I think we can definitely improve on it, especially on that high-end hiss you can hear in the background. First things first, I'll be using the audio track mixer to add all my effects. If you want to add the audio track mixer to your workspace, you just go to Window, select Audio Track Mixer, and select the timeline you're editing. In the audio track mixer, we want to click this little arrow in the upper left corner to show and hide the effects and sense. These five effects slots are where we're going to be adding our audio effects. This allows me to have as many audio clips on a single track and they all get the same processing. What this also means is that all my tracks need to have only one purpose. So if I have music that I want to go and play in the background, I cannot add it to the first track because it will get affected by the effects that we add on it. Now, noise reduction is ideally something that you don't need. If you had a good microphone, a perfectly quiet room, and a decent recorder, there shouldn't be any noise in your recording. But in reality, there's usually some noise in the recording and noise reduction plugins can help you reduce it. There are a lot of ways these plugins work, but the basic premise is they are trying to separate the frequencies of noise from the frequencies of your voice that they want to keep intact. Now, these plugins are not magical. They are not. So they won't save any terrible recording. But if you followed my advice and kept your microphone close, your voice should be a lot louder than the noise. Also note that the key with noise reduction is not to overdo it. Subtle is key. So if you overdo it, the plugin will start removing frequencies from your own voice rather than the noise, and this can create some really bad effects, like you're underwater. So let's check out the built-in de-noise plug-in in Premiere Pro. On your audio track in the first slot, click on the arrow, go to Noise Reduction and select DeNoise. Double-click on the plugin to show it and let's listen to it. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Now, you see the plugin already removed a lot of the noise, but you can hear these artifacts. So let's turn it to zero and fine tune it. This is how the vocal sounds without any noise reduction. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Now, as I'm closely listening to this vocal, I hear there's a lot of hiss in the higher frequencies, but I don't see any problems in the low end, in the base frequencies. So there are these buttons in the noise reduction plugin that allow me to change its focus. We can say to focus on all frequencies, to focus on the lower frequencies, to the middle frequencies, the lower and higher frequencies. For this particular vocal, I think this preset of focusing on the higher frequencies will work the best. So I'll just switch it over. Now let's play back our vocal. Just start adding the noise reduction slowly. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. I think that's it. As you can see, the noise has substantially lowered, but there are no audible artifacts here and listen to what happens if I go overboard. So this is 25 percent. Hi, my name is Raj. Listen to what happens if I go overboard. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. So all of the noise is gone, but you can hear that it sounds unnatural now. This is why you should be subtle. You just need to lower it enough so the noise isn't distracting. But if you remove all noise, it doesn't sound natural. So let's dial it back. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Now let's listen to the recording without noise reduction. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. With noise reduction. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. I think that sounds fantastic. When you're doing noise reduction, always do frequent checks, turn the plugin on and off. Our ears adapt very quickly to changes, so if you don't do the AB testing, there's a high chance you'll overdo it and your vocal will sound unnatural. Now, if you wanted more control than the Premiere Pro plugin, there is this great free plugin from Bertom audio, and it's called Denoisier Classic. Once you install it, you need to load it into Premiere Pro. The way you do that is by going to Edit, Preferences, and Audio. In the audio preferences, you click on the Audio Plug-in Manager, and here you click Scan for Plugins. I already did this, and as you can see, I have. But these are all mostly for music production. So just press Scan for Plugins and it will find any audio plugin you have installed on your computer and press Okay, and Okay again. Then if you want to load the Bertom noise reduction plugin, we can just remove the built-in Premier denoiser go to VSD3, which is the standard the plugin is written in, Restoration, and the Bertom Denoiser Classic. Double-click to open the plugin and now you see this interface. It might look a lot more confusing than the built-in Premiere plugin, but trust me, this one is also as simple to use as the Premiere one. If I play back any audio with this plugin, you can see that it currently isn't doing anything. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. That's because it's currently set at zero percent of noise reduction. So this first slider here is the amount of noise reduction we're going to apply. These sliders here represent certain frequencies. So these are low frequencies and these are high frequencies. The easiest way to use this plugin is by moving all the frequencies all the way down, and now let's play our audio and start turning up the master noise reduction slider. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Just like that, all over noise is gone and you can even go further. But listen to what happens. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. As you can see, the plugin is now removing frequencies of our own voice thinking it's the noise. So let's turn it back down. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. You can just stop there. But if you want, you can fine-tune specific frequencies. So for example, I know I don't have a lot of noise in my middle frequencies, so I can just turn them back up to make sure I'm not losing any detail in my voice in those areas. My name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. I also turned up a bit of the higher frequencies to make it sound more natural. So I like to leave a bit of hiss in the background, if that makes sense. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. I think it sounds perfect. Let's listen to the original sound. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. Now let's listen to the Bertom Denoiser Classic. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and The Rival. That's it. The key here is turning the plugin on and off every time you make an adjustment almost just to hear and listen to what sounds good and what doesn't sound good. Now, there are also paid plugins for noise reduction, and I personally use the Waves Clarity VX a lot. It's an AI-based plugin and it's just one moving knob. I got it on sale for $35, which is I think a pretty fair price. But if you're on a budget, you really don't need them. For all the examples you've heard previously, I just use the Bertom Denoiser. 11. Audio Editing: EQ & De Esser: Let's talk about frequencies. As we said previously, our voice is made up of lots of different frequencies that have different loudness, and the beauty of audio editing is that we can alter the loudness of specific frequencies. I want to show you two plug-ins that will help us do that. The first one is an equalizer, and the second one is a de-esser. We're back in Premiere Pro, and an equalizer is a plug-in that allows us to change and alter the loudness of frequencies. I'm going to be using the built-in Premiere Pro equalizer. Let's go to the second effect slot. Click on "Filter" and "EQ" and select "Parametric Equalizer". Double-click to open it, and this is the plug-in. Now, what's cool about this plugin is that, it can show you the frequencies you're editing. Listen to this. My name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade. You can see a graphical representation of all the frequencies that make up our recording. It starts at 20 hertz, all the way to 20,000 hertz, and this line shows you different loudnesses. This plugin is made up of different sections. Each of these sections are called the filter. Let's disable all of them for now. Let's talk about the first one and the last one. This first filter is known as the high-pass filter. What the high-pass filter does is that it removes everything under it. It removes all the low frequencies, and lets the high frequencies pass through. Let's listen to how that sounds. I'll just sweep it up. Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj. What you can change in this filter is the slope. This is how steep the filter is. If we set it at six decibels per octave, the removal of low frequencies will be gradual, and it will sound more natural. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. If you want the filter to be more surgical, to have a more harder cut, you set the slope to a higher number. If we set the slope to 48 decibels per octave. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade. You can see and hear how hard that cutoff was and how aggressively the filter removed the low frequencies. The low pass filter is the same as the high pass filter, but it does the exact opposite. It removes all the high frequencies, and it keeps the low frequencies intact. Let's listen to how that sounds. Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj, my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. This filter also has the slope setting. It can be a very smooth cut with a gradual reduction. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Or it can be a very hard cut. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's talk about the second next filter and the second last filter. These filters are called shelf filters. This is the low shelf, and this is the high shelf. What the low shelf filter does is that it boosts or cuts all frequencies under the selected frequency, while the high shelf filter does the opposite. It boosts or cuts all the frequencies over it. Let's listen to how the low shelf filter affects the sound. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. It might sound similar to the high-pass filter, but remember that the high pass filter will cut off everything. This one just lowers everything to the same values. In the low shelf and the high shelf filters, you can also select how steep they are. This is the smooth option and this is the hard option. Let's listen to how the high shelf filter sounds. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi. Let's cut the high frequencies. My name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. The next filters we're going to talk about, are these in the middle. These are known as bell filters. Why are they called bell filters? Well, when you boost or cut their frequencies, they form a bell. These filters boost a specific frequency and frequencies around it on both sides. You can control how many frequencies on this side this filter packs up, by using the Q value. It's this value right here. If we lower it, the filter becomes broader, and if we go and make it higher, the filter becomes narrower. Let's listen to how boosting or removing a certain frequency sounds. My name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's reset everything for now. How do you use these filters? That's the question. First of all, let me tell you the same thing we talked about the noise reduction applies here. Your ears get adjusted pretty quickly to EQ changes. It's important to turn the plugin on and off to make sure you're not overdoing things. Let's EQ this vocal together, and let me share you my approach and how I do it. I just start out with the clean default preset in the parametric equalizer. Let's now listen to our recording once again. I just have the denoiser on from the previous part. Hi, my name is Raj and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. The first thing I do is I high-pass the low end. We have talked about how the human voice is made up of many frequencies. But the human voice, no matter how deep of a voice somebody has always starts at around 85 hertz. I like to go to my high-pass filter, turn it on and cut off anything under 80. Let's listen to how that sounds. Hi, my name is Raj, and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. As you can see, there's not really a big change in their voice. But if I turn on the high-pass filter, hi, my name is Raj, you can see this low-end rumble. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival, that we removed and made it extra quiet. That's the point of a high-pass filter. It keeps your vocals clean, and removes any low-end humps. I keep my high-pass slope at 24 decibels per octave because, I think it sounds natural and that's the default in this equalizer. The second thing I want to do is clean up weird resonances in our sound. As we talked earlier, this might be a room, or maybe you had a cold and your voice sounds a bit nasally. Room resonances are found from 300-600, 700 hertz in this range. But how do you find the frequency that is problematic? I like to use a technique which is pretty simple, and it's called sweep and cut. For doing the sweep and cut, we need to use a bell filter. I'll grab one bell filter, which is filter number 2. I'll just set the Q value to three to make it a bit steeper. Then with this filter, I'll go ahead and sweep the frequency spectrum, and what I'm listening for are weird resonances. If you're in an untreated room, there is probably some rude resonance that is affecting your vocal. If you boost too high, everything will start sounding resonant. But if you boost for around 10 decibels, once you get to a certain frequency, you will hear a certain ringing. This might be harder to do in the beginning, but the more you do it, the more you train for this situation. Let's get started. I'll just start sweeping my vocals. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. As you can see here, I've found the room resonance, it's most hearable when I say hi. It just stands out from the rest of my voice as not natural and that's because it's the room resonating. Once you find your frequency, you go to the decibel selector and you just turn it down. Let's do that. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. You can see that the vocal sounds more cleaner now. If I go overboard and remove the frequency by too much, listen to what happens. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. The key here is to be subtle, maybe three or four descibles of reduction, maybe 5, 6, depends on how hard the resonance is. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Now let's listen with the filter off and the filter on. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. This is with the filter on. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. You can maybe repeat this process two or three times, but don't go overboard. Simplicity is key. Another frequency range that might be interesting to you is around one kilohertz. Let's listen to what happens when I boost and cut it. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. You can see that my vocal starts sounding a bit nasal, and this is a really cool trick to fix a vocal that sounds a bit nasally. You just turn down the one kilohertz. My favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Again, the key here is to be subtle. You can see that I'm not doing these moves. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Another range that is interesting is this right here from 2-4 kilohertz. If you're using cheaper microphones, these sound a bit harsh and you can remove harshness by sweeping these frequencies and cutting them. Let's try it out. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. You can see that right there it sounds particularly harsh, so let's just reduce it by a bit. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's listen to it without the fourth filter. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's listen to it with the fourth filter. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Again, all these differences are subtle, but once you add them up, it will transform your vocal. The last thing I like to do and this depends on the microphone you use, is to boost or reduce the high end. We'll use the high shelf here, I just leave it at default slope. Let's listen to what happens when I boost my high frequencies. I start to boost from around five kilohertz. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. You can see now I went overboard and it sounds too harsh, and if you lower it slowly. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I think that sounds good enough. Again, if your microphone was maybe having too much of a high-end, you would reduce this. So you would go, movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I'll just boost slightly. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner. That's my EQ done. Let's listen to the whole recording before and after we equed it. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. This is with the EQ. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. The key is to keep your cell natural. If you go overboard, it will just make your recording sound artificial. The idea here is to make your vocal prettier and not to transform it from the ground up. The next thing I want to tackle are S sounds or sibilance. Now, you might have noticed that I didn't want to fix this with an EQ, and that's because if we take an EQ, like the one we did and, for example, you can hear the sibilance right here when I say Suresh. What would happen if I took an EQ? So the Sure is right there, Suresh. You can see it actually. If I took an EQ like this band five, and I just turned it down, it fixes the problem, but the rest of the vocal can now sound a bit dull. My name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here's how it sounds without it. My name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner. You see how we removed a lot of the high frequencies just to fix that Sure. That's where an DeEsser comes to help. A DeEsser is a plugin that turns down the volume of your esses whenever they happen, but it doesn't affect the rest of the sounds. Let's add one. We go to the third effect slot, go to Amplitude and Compression, and select the DeEsser. Now, you can see that this plugin isn't in the EQ and filter section, but it still affects frequencies. This is because it's a hybrid. It affects the dynamics of the sound, but only in a certain frequency range. This DeEsser plugin from Premiere Pro is pretty easy to use. It already has a range selected for you. Now let's listen to what it does. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Here you can see how much it is reducing the sibilance sounds. If we lower this threshold, this is the control that will allow us to add more or less of our reduction. Let's try it out. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. As you can see, I have overdone it here and it started to remove some frequencies that I don't want. Let's turn it back up. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. If you're not sure if it's hitting the right frequencies, you can even select the output sibilance only option, and this will allow you to listen to just the sibilance sounds. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I see that I should maybe turn the frequency range a bit up and a bit lower. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. That sounds good to me. Let's click this button off. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Subtlety is key. I'll just go and disable this effect and listen to the sound. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's listen to the sound with it on. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I think I removed too much, so I'll just go and make my threshold a bit higher. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. I think that sounds good, so let's listen to it before again. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. Let's listen to it with the effect. Hi, my name is Suresh and my favorite movies are Blade Runner and Arrival. As you can see, the esses are still there, but they're not so distracting right now, and that's the point of a DeEsser. It's not there to remove the esses, it's just there to balance them out with the other sounds. 12. Audio Editing: Compression: Last but not least, we need to fix the dynamics of our sound. So the human voice has actually a pretty incredible dynamic range. We can be really quiet or we can be suddenly really loud. This might even be okay when listening to people in day to day life. But when you record something, you don't want the viewer to be turning the volume knob on their computer up or down. 13. Thank you: We've made it to the end of this class. I hope you enjoyed it, and that the world of audio equipment and editing is perhaps a bit more clear and more understandable. If you liked this class, be sure to rate and review it, and if something wasn't clear, I'm always here for your comments and suggestions. If you want to get notified about my next classes, you can follow me here on Skillshare, and if you want to keep in touch with me, you can follow me on Instagram @umcaruje. I'm wishing you a fantastic day or evening. Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you in the next one.