Audio Editing and Optimizing Techniques

hi there this is amish from audio imperfect and this my friend is getting out of hand i truly appreciate and respect your requests and i've been constantly telling you to follow brilliant audio experts like mike russell or jason levine they've got scores and scores of master classes on audio editing please do check them out but you still wanted to know how i do it so here it is all of the secrets will be revealed for you on demand in this video i'm going to take you through the entire process right from the essential points that i keep in mind while recording the equipments involved and also the entire audio editing process everything to get a clean and decent voice-over although this video is divided into timestamps i would highly recommend that you use these timestamps only as a reference after watching the video in its entirety because each section is extremely essential to keep your audio quality to its optimum level so without any further ado let's get started [Music] back in the magical world of audio this time i keep dropping it let me just keep it at the side now the very first thing to keep in mind actually it's the most important thing and that is everything starts at the source you can be in the best music studio in the world maybe even with hans zimmer or dr dre both completely opposite but you get the point so you can be there you can have the most expensive microphone you can have the best preamps and the best audio interfaces and even with rupert neve sitting behind the console you can still make a crap recording if the talent has cold or sore throat you get the point there right the only fix in this case to make the audio quality better is just gargling with warm salt water and also drinking lots of liquids and maybe resting for a few days right the point is we must focus on getting the source right first and then start from there and many times these fixes are not even recording gear related for instance let's say there's a guitar player with strings that are old and beaten in that case just changing the strings to new ones might drastically improve the guitar recordings you get the point now so always remember everything starts at the source in this video i'm going to share with you two things that we can do to the source that's going to make a night and day difference to your audio the first one is simply improving your room acoustics it doesn't have to be fancy it doesn't have to be expensive let me share with you a quick demonstration hi there again and the audio that you're listening to right now is being recorded in the zoom h1 in a small room where pixem perfect videos are shot as you can see in the background all of the acoustic treatment that you see it's all diy stuff nothing flashy nothing fancy and at the back you would be surprised this is just a wooden plank on top of that i've just stuck acoustic foam cheap acoustic foam that you can buy on amazon to be very honest it just gives the studio an expensive look that's it at the wall behind the camera there is no acoustic treatment very minimal on the ceiling there is no acoustic treatment and the rest of the acoustic treatment is done via things like a cloth hanger or you can also use super thick curtains they also work brilliantly so just to give you a reference this is the audio that you're hearing in a small diy acoustically treated room now we are recording in a room which is not at all acoustically treated and you can straight away figure out the difference it's just crazy in here at this point you can clearly tell the audio is not usable at all and if you try don't try this at home if you try to keep the microphone even a little further away in this situation trust me the audio is coming straight from here so what does that tell you again everything starts at the source in this situation even if you have the most expensive microphone in the world your audio is going to be crap no matter what the second one is finding the right distance between the source and the microphone in this case this is the source and this is the microphone how does distance affect it let's take a look now if there's a slight reverberation echo or resonant frequencies in your room that can be minimized and there's a trick to do it now of course there's just too much in this room and i would recommend that if you are working in a room like this just do some basic acoustic treatment like even setting up some thick curtains would work or just putting up mattresses on your wall would just improve the audio dramatically after you have done that even if you have a little bit of reflection reverb in your audio this is an easy way to fix that and here it is just understand the concept of how this works right now the level in my microphone the zoom h1 is 64. all right let us assume that the level of my voice going directly into the microphone is this much alright and the level of the reflected audio that is going into the microphone is this much all right what if i bring the microphone closer to the source or my mouth now the level of the audio that is going directly from my mouth or the source to the microphone is higher and the level of the reflected audio is kind of at the same place if i bring it even closer it's going to be even higher but the level of the reflected audio is in the same place but relatively right now the volume of the audio that is going directly into the microphone is higher okay now at the moment you can notice there's a lot of clipping happening the level is too high so what we will do is we'll just decrease the level now when i bring it closer to the mouth or the source you would notice that the level of the reflected audio also goes down together so you get a much more cleaner audio by simply bringing the microphone closer and decreasing the level of your microphone that's it however there's a demerit to it the closer you bring the microphone the bassier your voice is gonna get and if you bring it too close your voice can get too boomy so that is a double edged sword you have to find what is the sweet spot for you and you know what the great part about getting the source right is you can now record with the cheapest of the cheap microphone or even the most average microphone and your audio would still sound excellent i cannot even count how many times my friends have called me and i'm in this room talking to them with my phone and they're like are you using a sophisticated microphone connected to your phone or something like that how are you doing that to which my answer is i just improved the source that is in this case i just did some things to acoustically treat the room that's just it to demonstrate the point you're listening to this audio directly from my phone and there has been no post processing done whatsoever and this is the voice that you will hear on a phone call with me if i record the same thing in an untreated room this my friend is the audio that you will hear and as you can clearly see this my friend is totally messed up and absolutely unusable probably you cannot even tell what i'm saying so again i'm gonna return to my room right now so returning to the room back to the diy acoustically treated room and as you can see there's a massive difference again everything starts at the source as for my gear at the moment i'm using the neumann u87a and trust me you do not need this microphone this is absolutely ridiculous keep in mind i have a hobby of collecting microphones and this is something i gifted to myself when we finished 650 videos on youtube for pixem perfect so just to celebrate that this was a gift from me to myself if you look at my previous videos i have been using the neumann tlm-102 which is one-fifth the price of the u87 ai but look at this it is just so beautiful it is one of my all-time favorite microphones and if you watch those videos unless you're wearing a very high quality headphone and that too you are listening for it you cannot tell the difference between the audio so it's a very marginal difference this is just for me at least a novelty gift yes you can hear the difference yes there's very less sibilance yes the audio is more balanced out but on youtube felt before using this microphone for pixel perfect videos i had been using the samsung c01u pro one of my favorite microphones for a lot of years i liked it so so much that i bought two of these and none of these sponsor my videos samsung neumann very guys anyway so this is the one that i bought first as you can see i have had lots of good memories with it and this is the second one that i bought and i still use it whenever i'm traveling this is a usb microphone so all you have to do is to connect it to your computer or laptop and it's good to go you don't have to worry about no software no audio interface just directly connected set the right level and start recording brilliant audio quality absolute killer price and i'm sure that in that price range this is the best and i highly recommend this if you're starting out now as for other equipments my setup is pretty simple the microphone is directly connected to my audio interface which is the focusrite 8i6 which connects directly to my computer now you might ask mesh why are you using focusrite 8i6 when you're just using one input just one voice you could also use the focusrite 2i2 or focusrite solo so there's a reason to it 8i6 gives me more inputs and outputs to play with sometimes i like to play with surround sound so i have 2 speakers at the front two speakers at the back you might have seen it in other videos and i connect it with different outputs to just play an awesome surround sound and watch movies which are in 5.1 surround sound secondly i play the keyboard a little bit it's just a hobby so i needed an additional input for it but you might still ask and may you could do with 2i2 probably maybe a little higher model but y8i6 well there's a second feature in 8i6 which only exists in 4 i4 and above and that is i'm sorry about that and that is the loop back feature whenever you're looking for an audio interface this is a good to have feature not a must-have but a good to have feature what loopback feature does is that it internally allows you to route the audio and also record desktop audio now what does that mean let's say you're recording your audio in adobe audition and you have set the audio input to lube back now inside of the loopback channel you have turned on desktop audio now you are recording you're speaking into the microphone your voice will be recorded now if you play any music on your computer let's say on youtube music you're playing something like beethoven's fifth symphony it is also being recorded you get the point so it is internally being recorded from your computer into it now you can do it via third-party applications but when it's internal it's just absolutely seamless it's a vast fast feature just look into it and that's one of the reasons why i use the 8i6 now finally it is time for us to get into editing now before we begin let me remind you this is not the only way to edit audio again editing audio is an art there is no right or wrong as long as you're getting the results that you want or the sound that you prefer any way that you're comfortable with is the best one for you now the method that i'm gonna share with you is how i personally prefer to edit and process my voice now for this section of the video we're not gonna process the audio that is going into the microphone right now because that can create confusions as we are editing one of our own recordings so to keep it simple for this section the audio will not be processed you my friend are exactly hearing what the microphone is capturing with no processing at all back in the magical world of adobe audition and this is the software that i prefer for audio editing now here's the sample audio that we're gonna edit and you can download this using the links in the description let's listen to it first and then we're going to work on this have a little patience it's important to analyze let's play it hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like mouth noise like the noise that inadvertently happens when you speak see that how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words also we will learn the best way to fix room noise let's stay quiet to listen to it could you hear the noise the room noise if you just bump up your gain a little much you would be able to listen that i have very less room noise the only noise that you hear is the noise from the fans of my computer and the ac so let's work on this audio speaking of noise it is the first thing that we're going to remove and the plug-in that i use and prefer is actually a collection of plug-ins and that is the industry standard for audio repair and that suite is called izotope rx8 advanced just don't ask me the price it's just ridiculous anyway let's get back to it now you can also remove noise using the built-in features in adobe audition but this is just flawless here's how this works now i like to add all of my effects into the effects rack as a stack so that we can create a preset of it and we don't have to work as hard again and again so first of all click on this arrow and let's go to vst or vsd3 restoration isotope and here let's choose spectral denoise first of all we need to find a place in the audio with a clean noise signal so now let's turn off this effect bring up the spectral view this is just a graphical view of how loud a particular frequency is so as you can see right here the lower frequencies have more noise than the higher frequencies but the important thing to keep in mind here is that once you're sampling for a clean noise just don't sample this area right here if you are not seeing into the spectral view you couldn't tell there was something else right it looks plain but as soon as you just bring up the spectral view you can see that apart from noise there are some other sounds here maybe my hand touched the table or maybe some other sound so you want to avoid that you want to have a place of clean noise so this looks very clean so we're going to select that let's make the range a little larger so after every recording i keep the recording going for a while so that it can also record the noise properly so now let's select this particular area and we're going to click on learn so that the rx8 can first analyze what do you mean by noise and then remove that right so once learn is activated let's play it okay now it's analyzing it's averaging all of that now i think it's more than enough now i'm not sure if you can hear the noise but i'm going to make it louder for you so that it's easily audible so i'm going to turn off my microphone right now so that you don't hear my noise okay i hope you could hear the noise now let's turn on this effect and see how it removes the noise i'm gonna turn off my microphone again now this my friend is the reduction slider how much do you want to reduce the noise so keep it at zero as you can see there's a little bit noise there slowly and gradually keep on increasing it and stop at the point where all of it goes away we can actually stop at six but i'm going to keep it at 12 because after adding a lot of filters this can get a little louder which will introduce a little more noise so it is convenient to have it a little higher and it's like photoshop they're all adjustment layers you can come back always and adjust these later if the reduction is too high it might interfere with the audio so we don't want that so just find a sweet spot and now let's move on to the next effect let's let go of the spectral preview now keep in mind we are creating a preset so we want to create a preset that works in most conditions sometimes i might keep the microphone a little further away sometimes it's very close by sometimes the levels are different so we want to have an effect there that we can use to bring the audio at a comparable level so that the preset works with all of your audio recordings that you of course record in the same situation all right so for that we're going to add a simple amplifier so inside of amplitude and compression let's add amplify and for the filter that i create i want the level to be something standard so right now if you just play it let's see where the level is hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to if you keep the amplitude in the middle which is zero untouched this is the length your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore so right now the level is somewhere between -15 and -9 we want the level to be somewhere between -12 and minus six so let's go ahead and try increasing it by four decibels and see how the levels are now this is one of those effects that's gonna change with different audios so if you load this preset in another audio you would have to play with amplify also you would have to play with denoise because the noise can be slightly different sometimes the ac might be running at a different speed or your computer might make a little more or a little less noise so denoise and amplify are the two effects that will change from audio to audio but these are all non-destructive all right let's play it it's audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells i think it's a little too high so let's keep it three for this one to bring up details in the audio and also a little base let's go ahead and add a parametric equalizer so click on the arrow right there filter and eq parametric equalizer and there's a great preset here and that is loudness maximizer let's hear the difference so this was the before hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording let's listen to it again with this one turned on hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording now at this point if you think the bass is just too much you can just go back to the parametric equalizer and in the base side you can just decrease the base so right now it is three decibels so you can decrease it to two or one or if you think it's just too bright just decrease it from six to five or four it's up to you you can adjust it to your liking the next filter that we're going to add is a compressor now if you want to understand what a compressor does there are tons and tons and scores of videos on youtube it is a great concept look into it but basically it does what it says that is it compresses the audio let's say in your audio there are some parts that are just suddenly too loud so a compressor will bring those loud parts down makes sense so there are these peaks right so there are these peaks right there it's going to bring that down so you will have an audio where the silent parts are not that silent or the extremely loud parts are not that loud now you can control how much compression you want to keep if the compression is too high it is just going sound unnatural but in this case we are simply using a preset so let's click on the next arrow go to amplitude and compression and here choose multiband compressor choose that and choose a preset called broadcast that's all you gotta do and now let's play it hi there this is umesh from picks imperfect and in this audio it's awesome isn't it let's look at the before and after so god is the best hi there this is imperfect and in this audio recording let's play this one we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better let's turn it on we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better pretty good isn't it now i feel the bass here is just too much so i'm gonna decrease the threshold to about minus 30. it's a little better we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better all right there you go awesome improvement now as we record into the microphone and that's why i'm not editing this audio there are some unwanted mouth noises that also get captured like this you got to remove that right for that again we're going to use an rx8 plug-in and that is called mouth de-click so click on the next arrow vst 3 restoration isotope and mouth d click and there was a part of the audio let's turn this off for a moment that was a part of the audio where we did it on purpose so let's play that inadvertently happens when it's cringy isn't it so anyway so this was all the mouth noise and you turn this on have a look you speak see that advertently happens when you speak it's much lesser let's play this this one see the clicks are going away if i turn this on so to show you exactly what it's doing here's an option called output clicks only if i turn that on it's going to show you what it is removing so let's play a part of the audio let's take this one we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better if i click on output clicks only it's going to show you see those clicks now the sensitivity is too much so it's also getting into the audio so let's decrease the sensitivity to three percent the clicks we have while we speak see let's play this part of the audio are you seeing what we are removing now if you're doing voiceovers it is important that you master the techniques first and minimize breath noises right into the source however we are humans while i'm recording tutorials i sometimes have some breath noises in my audio and this is how to fix it have a look at this how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words okay so how do we remove that of course we can start selecting it and decreasing the amplitude but that's going to take a long time so let's add a plug-in here and by the way rx is not paying me anything i had to pay it all of my own pocket anyway how can we forget brett all right let's select this section all right just for sample let's see what they are doing now click on the arrow again vst 3 restoration isotope and here we're going to choose breadth control now i leave it at default choose gain and i want to decrease the breath by about -14 decibels if you decrease it too much it's gonna just hamper into the audio so now have a look what it does how can we forget breath much lesser have a look before and after how can we forget how can we forget this is the after have a look at the before how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we completely remove it take it all the way down to infinity how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words also if you take it all the way down it becomes unnatural so find a sweet spot for me i choose -14 this is a good place to be make sure you choose gain and there you have it now if you still feel there's a lot of bass in the audio you can easily remove that again using a parametric equalizer so let's again go to filter and eq parametric equalizer and i want to add a little more detail in the bright parts so let's add a loudness maximizer again and i don't want so much detail so let's go with 4 there and click on this button it just takes down the base areas now we don't want any bump in the base so let's turn it off by turning off the l right there and let's go for a smoother transition let's choose 12 right there and at about 120 hertz so this to me looks right now let's listen to the before and after this is the before problems like sibilance but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance now this is the after but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance now i like the details and the highlights but there's a lot of s's in there so if i play this she sells seashells by the seashore you see there are lots of s's so how do we remove that again by using another filter from rx8 advanced and that is isotope rx8 ds now again i leave it at default you can choose how much you want to remove the s so here let's play this she sells seashells it's removing the s just too much here's the before sibilance sibilance sibilance here's the after sibilance it's removing it too much let's go for minus eight instead of minus 12. this is much better sibilants sibilants sibilants before sibilance sibilance sibilance sibilance sibilant voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like let's look at how the noise situation is see you can hear the noise right now so again go to rx8 spectral denoise and increase it from 12 to let's say 16. much better now there is a quality slider the more the quality the heavier the load will be on your cpu but still let's choose the highest quality and now let's play it we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells now let's look at the complete before and after here is the before if i turn off everything hi there this is unmesh from pics imperfect let's look at the after and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better to bring out a little more in the voice i feel that we can go to where we added loudness maximizer on number three now if you want to enhance the vocals a little more i feel that let's create a point in the middle all right at about thousand hertz right and hi there this is from take it down pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio the change right there let's look at the before and after from pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording much better isn't it but we don't want it too much let's go for about -4 but again this is too sharp we want it to be smoother so let's go for 1.5 that way it'll be a little smoother now a major warning whatever i'm going to share with you right now is going to be an extremely high frequency so if you have problems listening to high frequencies please skip this part of the video now in a human voice anything above 16 000 hertz it's absolutely unnecessary so if you open up the spectral frequency display so right here this is 16k which is 16 000 hertz if i try to play just that anything above 16 000 hertz hear it with headphones but with caution when i hear it i have a feeling in my throat it just begins to vibrate be very careful now this part is absolutely useless you can actually select this part and delete it or if you absolutely want to create a preset just add something here that does that for you so let's add one more parametric equalizer and click on this button now let's dial in 16 000 and we want it to be as sharp as possible so let's choose 48 so it takes that away and there you have it you're recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems so here my friend we have a basic preset made do not forget to save it so click on this button to save this preset and let's name it dedicated to you all right because this is dedicated to you hit ok now anytime i load any audio all i have to do first of all let's say this is empty this is the before this is amazed from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better all we have to do is to choose that where it is as you can see i have made tons and tons and tons of preset and that was just a basic preset that i created for you but for my personal use i have presets for different situations as you can see there is just so many on mesh preset one eight bass removal there's there's dinda there is if you just come down there would be picks imperfect one two three four there are some testing presets there are some presets for different microphones it is just crazy as to how many presets i have created anyway let's jump to dedicate it to you this is what you have to do and now play it it's going to be loaded right there hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording and anytime you load an audio just load this preset and then work on just two things first one is spectral denoise just open that and for your audio train it differently so let's say this is the noise in your audio just select that click on learn let it learn then turn off learn and just control how much you want to reduce it okay also then control the amplify so that the audio is between -6 and -12 also we will learn the best way to fix room noise let's now right now the other ones are on so if you load this preset in this case after everything is on just make sure this is image from perfect and clipping and it's somewhere in the red audio recording we're going to it's somewhere in the red area a little bit i represent not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like mouth noise in the end it also helps if you play with amplify so let's go to amplify pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from bix imperfect and in this video recording hi there this is umesh if i change it to zero see what happens hi there this is umesh from big simple it's a little different have a look it when it was three hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect now let's change it to zero hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio it's a little more cleaner now after you have done that simply apply the preset after you made the changes according to your audio just apply that now if the audio comes to be a little inverted don't worry you can just go to stereo imagery graphic phase shifter and you can just set it probably a little lower okay and then process it apply it again so it's a little bit in the middle workable anyway so after you have done that we need to normalize the audio but before normalize it we need to just remove the excessive peaks so where are the peaks they are around minus three minus four so select all go to effect amplitude and compression hard limiter so it's around -4 choose that applied so the excessiveness is gone now let's go to effect amplitude and compression and then normalize let's set it to 96 percent 1996 percent let's go for 92 apply so there you have standard volume audio let's play it hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore now there's a major disclaimer the complete setup that i showed you sounds great on my voice to me again for some people this might not sound as good so this sounds great to me for your voice there might be some different little tweaks that you might have to do if you find that this audio is too bright just take down the highs a little bit if you need more bass just increase the bass a little bit in the equalizer if you need more compression just increase it a little bit more you get the point there so there you go that's my entire setup for audio this video like many other videos have not been cheap to make besides it's not sponsored either actually adobe audition costs a lot i have to pay for it monthly rx 8 advanced wow i i had to pay for it out of my own pocket they are not sponsoring this video at all so as you can see the price is just ridiculous so i'm still trying to recoup the costs on top of that four years of trial and errors to just find the perfect combination of the perfect settings for each scenario and each room so right now i'm recording in the small room sometimes there's some other room so it takes a hell of time to perfect it and find something that you like for each situation i would truly appreciate if you could support pixem perfect to keep this content free please check out our patreon page at patreon.comperfect and if you become a member there are also some perks for it i hope you enjoyed this video and if you want me to do more videos like this please let me know in the comments thank you so much to our patreons for making this video possible in the first place without their support none of this would ever have been possible thank you so much again for watching i'll see you in my next one till then stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating [Music] you

hi there this is amish from audio imperfect and this my friend is getting out of hand i truly appreciate and respect your requests and i&#39;ve been constantly telling you to follow brilliant audio experts like mike russell or jason levine they&#39;ve got scores and scores of master classes on audio editing please do check them out but you still wanted to know how i do it so here it is all of the secrets will be revealed for you on demand in this video i&#39;m going to take you through the entire process right from the essential points that i keep in mind while recording the equipments involved and also the entire audio editing process everything to get a clean and decent voice-over although this video is divided into timestamps i would highly recommend that you use these timestamps only as a reference after watching the video in its entirety because each section is extremely essential to keep your audio quality to its optimum level so without any further ado let&#39;s get started [Music] back in the magical world of audio this time i keep dropping it let me just keep it at the side now the very first thing to keep in mind actually it&#39;s the most important thing and that is everything starts at the source you can be in the best music studio in the world maybe even with hans zimmer or dr dre both completely opposite but you get the point so you can be there you can have the most expensive microphone you can have the best preamps and the best audio interfaces and even with rupert neve sitting behind the console you can still make a crap recording if the talent has cold or sore throat you get the point there right the only fix in this case to make the audio quality better is just gargling with warm salt water and also drinking lots of liquids and maybe resting for a few days right the point is we must focus on getting the source right first and then start from there and many times these fixes are not even recording gear related for instance let&#39;s say there&#39;s a guitar player with strings that are old and beaten in that case just changing the strings to new ones might drastically improve the guitar recordings you get the point now so always remember everything starts at the source in this video i&#39;m going to share with you two things that we can do to the source that&#39;s going to make a night and day difference to your audio the first one is simply improving your room acoustics it doesn&#39;t have to be fancy it doesn&#39;t have to be expensive let me share with you a quick demonstration hi there again and the audio that you&#39;re listening to right now is being recorded in the zoom h1 in a small room where pixem perfect videos are shot as you can see in the background all of the acoustic treatment that you see it&#39;s all diy stuff nothing flashy nothing fancy and at the back you would be surprised this is just a wooden plank on top of that i&#39;ve just stuck acoustic foam cheap acoustic foam that you can buy on amazon to be very honest it just gives the studio an expensive look that&#39;s it at the wall behind the camera there is no acoustic treatment very minimal on the ceiling there is no acoustic treatment and the rest of the acoustic treatment is done via things like a cloth hanger or you can also use super thick curtains they also work brilliantly so just to give you a reference this is the audio that you&#39;re hearing in a small diy acoustically treated room now we are recording in a room which is not at all acoustically treated and you can straight away figure out the difference it&#39;s just crazy in here at this point you can clearly tell the audio is not usable at all and if you try don&#39;t try this at home if you try to keep the microphone even a little further away in this situation trust me the audio is coming straight from here so what does that tell you again everything starts at the source in this situation even if you have the most expensive microphone in the world your audio is going to be crap no matter what the second one is finding the right distance between the source and the microphone in this case this is the source and this is the microphone how does distance affect it let&#39;s take a look now if there&#39;s a slight reverberation echo or resonant frequencies in your room that can be minimized and there&#39;s a trick to do it now of course there&#39;s just too much in this room and i would recommend that if you are working in a room like this just do some basic acoustic treatment like even setting up some thick curtains would work or just putting up mattresses on your wall would just improve the audio dramatically after you have done that even if you have a little bit of reflection reverb in your audio this is an easy way to fix that and here it is just understand the concept of how this works right now the level in my microphone the zoom h1 is 64. all right let us assume that the level of my voice going directly into the microphone is this much alright and the level of the reflected audio that is going into the microphone is this much all right what if i bring the microphone closer to the source or my mouth now the level of the audio that is going directly from my mouth or the source to the microphone is higher and the level of the reflected audio is kind of at the same place if i bring it even closer it&#39;s going to be even higher but the level of the reflected audio is in the same place but relatively right now the volume of the audio that is going directly into the microphone is higher okay now at the moment you can notice there&#39;s a lot of clipping happening the level is too high so what we will do is we&#39;ll just decrease the level now when i bring it closer to the mouth or the source you would notice that the level of the reflected audio also goes down together so you get a much more cleaner audio by simply bringing the microphone closer and decreasing the level of your microphone that&#39;s it however there&#39;s a demerit to it the closer you bring the microphone the bassier your voice is gonna get and if you bring it too close your voice can get too boomy so that is a double edged sword you have to find what is the sweet spot for you and you know what the great part about getting the source right is you can now record with the cheapest of the cheap microphone or even the most average microphone and your audio would still sound excellent i cannot even count how many times my friends have called me and i&#39;m in this room talking to them with my phone and they&#39;re like are you using a sophisticated microphone connected to your phone or something like that how are you doing that to which my answer is i just improved the source that is in this case i just did some things to acoustically treat the room that&#39;s just it to demonstrate the point you&#39;re listening to this audio directly from my phone and there has been no post processing done whatsoever and this is the voice that you will hear on a phone call with me if i record the same thing in an untreated room this my friend is the audio that you will hear and as you can clearly see this my friend is totally messed up and absolutely unusable probably you cannot even tell what i&#39;m saying so again i&#39;m gonna return to my room right now so returning to the room back to the diy acoustically treated room and as you can see there&#39;s a massive difference again everything starts at the source as for my gear at the moment i&#39;m using the neumann u87a and trust me you do not need this microphone this is absolutely ridiculous keep in mind i have a hobby of collecting microphones and this is something i gifted to myself when we finished 650 videos on youtube for pixem perfect so just to celebrate that this was a gift from me to myself if you look at my previous videos i have been using the neumann tlm-102 which is one-fifth the price of the u87 ai but look at this it is just so beautiful it is one of my all-time favorite microphones and if you watch those videos unless you&#39;re wearing a very high quality headphone and that too you are listening for it you cannot tell the difference between the audio so it&#39;s a very marginal difference this is just for me at least a novelty gift yes you can hear the difference yes there&#39;s very less sibilance yes the audio is more balanced out but on youtube felt before using this microphone for pixel perfect videos i had been using the samsung c01u pro one of my favorite microphones for a lot of years i liked it so so much that i bought two of these and none of these sponsor my videos samsung neumann very guys anyway so this is the one that i bought first as you can see i have had lots of good memories with it and this is the second one that i bought and i still use it whenever i&#39;m traveling this is a usb microphone so all you have to do is to connect it to your computer or laptop and it&#39;s good to go you don&#39;t have to worry about no software no audio interface just directly connected set the right level and start recording brilliant audio quality absolute killer price and i&#39;m sure that in that price range this is the best and i highly recommend this if you&#39;re starting out now as for other equipments my setup is pretty simple the microphone is directly connected to my audio interface which is the focusrite 8i6 which connects directly to my computer now you might ask mesh why are you using focusrite 8i6 when you&#39;re just using one input just one voice you could also use the focusrite 2i2 or focusrite solo so there&#39;s a reason to it 8i6 gives me more inputs and outputs to play with sometimes i like to play with surround sound so i have 2 speakers at the front two speakers at the back you might have seen it in other videos and i connect it with different outputs to just play an awesome surround sound and watch movies which are in 5.1 surround sound secondly i play the keyboard a little bit it&#39;s just a hobby so i needed an additional input for it but you might still ask and may you could do with 2i2 probably maybe a little higher model but y8i6 well there&#39;s a second feature in 8i6 which only exists in 4 i4 and above and that is i&#39;m sorry about that and that is the loop back feature whenever you&#39;re looking for an audio interface this is a good to have feature not a must-have but a good to have feature what loopback feature does is that it internally allows you to route the audio and also record desktop audio now what does that mean let&#39;s say you&#39;re recording your audio in adobe audition and you have set the audio input to lube back now inside of the loopback channel you have turned on desktop audio now you are recording you&#39;re speaking into the microphone your voice will be recorded now if you play any music on your computer let&#39;s say on youtube music you&#39;re playing something like beethoven&#39;s fifth symphony it is also being recorded you get the point so it is internally being recorded from your computer into it now you can do it via third-party applications but when it&#39;s internal it&#39;s just absolutely seamless it&#39;s a vast fast feature just look into it and that&#39;s one of the reasons why i use the 8i6 now finally it is time for us to get into editing now before we begin let me remind you this is not the only way to edit audio again editing audio is an art there is no right or wrong as long as you&#39;re getting the results that you want or the sound that you prefer any way that you&#39;re comfortable with is the best one for you now the method that i&#39;m gonna share with you is how i personally prefer to edit and process my voice now for this section of the video we&#39;re not gonna process the audio that is going into the microphone right now because that can create confusions as we are editing one of our own recordings so to keep it simple for this section the audio will not be processed you my friend are exactly hearing what the microphone is capturing with no processing at all back in the magical world of adobe audition and this is the software that i prefer for audio editing now here&#39;s the sample audio that we&#39;re gonna edit and you can download this using the links in the description let&#39;s listen to it first and then we&#39;re going to work on this have a little patience it&#39;s important to analyze let&#39;s play it hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like mouth noise like the noise that inadvertently happens when you speak see that how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words also we will learn the best way to fix room noise let&#39;s stay quiet to listen to it could you hear the noise the room noise if you just bump up your gain a little much you would be able to listen that i have very less room noise the only noise that you hear is the noise from the fans of my computer and the ac so let&#39;s work on this audio speaking of noise it is the first thing that we&#39;re going to remove and the plug-in that i use and prefer is actually a collection of plug-ins and that is the industry standard for audio repair and that suite is called izotope rx8 advanced just don&#39;t ask me the price it&#39;s just ridiculous anyway let&#39;s get back to it now you can also remove noise using the built-in features in adobe audition but this is just flawless here&#39;s how this works now i like to add all of my effects into the effects rack as a stack so that we can create a preset of it and we don&#39;t have to work as hard again and again so first of all click on this arrow and let&#39;s go to vst or vsd3 restoration isotope and here let&#39;s choose spectral denoise first of all we need to find a place in the audio with a clean noise signal so now let&#39;s turn off this effect bring up the spectral view this is just a graphical view of how loud a particular frequency is so as you can see right here the lower frequencies have more noise than the higher frequencies but the important thing to keep in mind here is that once you&#39;re sampling for a clean noise just don&#39;t sample this area right here if you are not seeing into the spectral view you couldn&#39;t tell there was something else right it looks plain but as soon as you just bring up the spectral view you can see that apart from noise there are some other sounds here maybe my hand touched the table or maybe some other sound so you want to avoid that you want to have a place of clean noise so this looks very clean so we&#39;re going to select that let&#39;s make the range a little larger so after every recording i keep the recording going for a while so that it can also record the noise properly so now let&#39;s select this particular area and we&#39;re going to click on learn so that the rx8 can first analyze what do you mean by noise and then remove that right so once learn is activated let&#39;s play it okay now it&#39;s analyzing it&#39;s averaging all of that now i think it&#39;s more than enough now i&#39;m not sure if you can hear the noise but i&#39;m going to make it louder for you so that it&#39;s easily audible so i&#39;m going to turn off my microphone right now so that you don&#39;t hear my noise okay i hope you could hear the noise now let&#39;s turn on this effect and see how it removes the noise i&#39;m gonna turn off my microphone again now this my friend is the reduction slider how much do you want to reduce the noise so keep it at zero as you can see there&#39;s a little bit noise there slowly and gradually keep on increasing it and stop at the point where all of it goes away we can actually stop at six but i&#39;m going to keep it at 12 because after adding a lot of filters this can get a little louder which will introduce a little more noise so it is convenient to have it a little higher and it&#39;s like photoshop they&#39;re all adjustment layers you can come back always and adjust these later if the reduction is too high it might interfere with the audio so we don&#39;t want that so just find a sweet spot and now let&#39;s move on to the next effect let&#39;s let go of the spectral preview now keep in mind we are creating a preset so we want to create a preset that works in most conditions sometimes i might keep the microphone a little further away sometimes it&#39;s very close by sometimes the levels are different so we want to have an effect there that we can use to bring the audio at a comparable level so that the preset works with all of your audio recordings that you of course record in the same situation all right so for that we&#39;re going to add a simple amplifier so inside of amplitude and compression let&#39;s add amplify and for the filter that i create i want the level to be something standard so right now if you just play it let&#39;s see where the level is hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to if you keep the amplitude in the middle which is zero untouched this is the length your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore so right now the level is somewhere between -15 and -9 we want the level to be somewhere between -12 and minus six so let&#39;s go ahead and try increasing it by four decibels and see how the levels are now this is one of those effects that&#39;s gonna change with different audios so if you load this preset in another audio you would have to play with amplify also you would have to play with denoise because the noise can be slightly different sometimes the ac might be running at a different speed or your computer might make a little more or a little less noise so denoise and amplify are the two effects that will change from audio to audio but these are all non-destructive all right let&#39;s play it it&#39;s audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells i think it&#39;s a little too high so let&#39;s keep it three for this one to bring up details in the audio and also a little base let&#39;s go ahead and add a parametric equalizer so click on the arrow right there filter and eq parametric equalizer and there&#39;s a great preset here and that is loudness maximizer let&#39;s hear the difference so this was the before hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording let&#39;s listen to it again with this one turned on hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording now at this point if you think the bass is just too much you can just go back to the parametric equalizer and in the base side you can just decrease the base so right now it is three decibels so you can decrease it to two or one or if you think it&#39;s just too bright just decrease it from six to five or four it&#39;s up to you you can adjust it to your liking the next filter that we&#39;re going to add is a compressor now if you want to understand what a compressor does there are tons and tons and scores of videos on youtube it is a great concept look into it but basically it does what it says that is it compresses the audio let&#39;s say in your audio there are some parts that are just suddenly too loud so a compressor will bring those loud parts down makes sense so there are these peaks right so there are these peaks right there it&#39;s going to bring that down so you will have an audio where the silent parts are not that silent or the extremely loud parts are not that loud now you can control how much compression you want to keep if the compression is too high it is just going sound unnatural but in this case we are simply using a preset so let&#39;s click on the next arrow go to amplitude and compression and here choose multiband compressor choose that and choose a preset called broadcast that&#39;s all you gotta do and now let&#39;s play it hi there this is umesh from picks imperfect and in this audio it&#39;s awesome isn&#39;t it let&#39;s look at the before and after so god is the best hi there this is imperfect and in this audio recording let&#39;s play this one we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better let&#39;s turn it on we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better pretty good isn&#39;t it now i feel the bass here is just too much so i&#39;m gonna decrease the threshold to about minus 30. it&#39;s a little better we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better all right there you go awesome improvement now as we record into the microphone and that&#39;s why i&#39;m not editing this audio there are some unwanted mouth noises that also get captured like this you got to remove that right for that again we&#39;re going to use an rx8 plug-in and that is called mouth de-click so click on the next arrow vst 3 restoration isotope and mouth d click and there was a part of the audio let&#39;s turn this off for a moment that was a part of the audio where we did it on purpose so let&#39;s play that inadvertently happens when it&#39;s cringy isn&#39;t it so anyway so this was all the mouth noise and you turn this on have a look you speak see that advertently happens when you speak it&#39;s much lesser let&#39;s play this this one see the clicks are going away if i turn this on so to show you exactly what it&#39;s doing here&#39;s an option called output clicks only if i turn that on it&#39;s going to show you what it is removing so let&#39;s play a part of the audio let&#39;s take this one we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better if i click on output clicks only it&#39;s going to show you see those clicks now the sensitivity is too much so it&#39;s also getting into the audio so let&#39;s decrease the sensitivity to three percent the clicks we have while we speak see let&#39;s play this part of the audio are you seeing what we are removing now if you&#39;re doing voiceovers it is important that you master the techniques first and minimize breath noises right into the source however we are humans while i&#39;m recording tutorials i sometimes have some breath noises in my audio and this is how to fix it have a look at this how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words okay so how do we remove that of course we can start selecting it and decreasing the amplitude but that&#39;s going to take a long time so let&#39;s add a plug-in here and by the way rx is not paying me anything i had to pay it all of my own pocket anyway how can we forget brett all right let&#39;s select this section all right just for sample let&#39;s see what they are doing now click on the arrow again vst 3 restoration isotope and here we&#39;re going to choose breadth control now i leave it at default choose gain and i want to decrease the breath by about -14 decibels if you decrease it too much it&#39;s gonna just hamper into the audio so now have a look what it does how can we forget breath much lesser have a look before and after how can we forget how can we forget this is the after have a look at the before how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we forget how can we completely remove it take it all the way down to infinity how can we forget breath noise because we tend to take breaths between words also if you take it all the way down it becomes unnatural so find a sweet spot for me i choose -14 this is a good place to be make sure you choose gain and there you have it now if you still feel there&#39;s a lot of bass in the audio you can easily remove that again using a parametric equalizer so let&#39;s again go to filter and eq parametric equalizer and i want to add a little more detail in the bright parts so let&#39;s add a loudness maximizer again and i don&#39;t want so much detail so let&#39;s go with 4 there and click on this button it just takes down the base areas now we don&#39;t want any bump in the base so let&#39;s turn it off by turning off the l right there and let&#39;s go for a smoother transition let&#39;s choose 12 right there and at about 120 hertz so this to me looks right now let&#39;s listen to the before and after this is the before problems like sibilance but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance now this is the after but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance now i like the details and the highlights but there&#39;s a lot of s&#39;s in there so if i play this she sells seashells by the seashore you see there are lots of s&#39;s so how do we remove that again by using another filter from rx8 advanced and that is isotope rx8 ds now again i leave it at default you can choose how much you want to remove the s so here let&#39;s play this she sells seashells it&#39;s removing the s just too much here&#39;s the before sibilance sibilance sibilance here&#39;s the after sibilance it&#39;s removing it too much let&#39;s go for minus eight instead of minus 12. this is much better sibilants sibilants sibilants before sibilance sibilance sibilance sibilance sibilant voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like let&#39;s look at how the noise situation is see you can hear the noise right now so again go to rx8 spectral denoise and increase it from 12 to let&#39;s say 16. much better now there is a quality slider the more the quality the heavier the load will be on your cpu but still let&#39;s choose the highest quality and now let&#39;s play it we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells now let&#39;s look at the complete before and after here is the before if i turn off everything hi there this is unmesh from pics imperfect let&#39;s look at the after and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better to bring out a little more in the voice i feel that we can go to where we added loudness maximizer on number three now if you want to enhance the vocals a little more i feel that let&#39;s create a point in the middle all right at about thousand hertz right and hi there this is from take it down pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio the change right there let&#39;s look at the before and after from pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording much better isn&#39;t it but we don&#39;t want it too much let&#39;s go for about -4 but again this is too sharp we want it to be smoother so let&#39;s go for 1.5 that way it&#39;ll be a little smoother now a major warning whatever i&#39;m going to share with you right now is going to be an extremely high frequency so if you have problems listening to high frequencies please skip this part of the video now in a human voice anything above 16 000 hertz it&#39;s absolutely unnecessary so if you open up the spectral frequency display so right here this is 16k which is 16 000 hertz if i try to play just that anything above 16 000 hertz hear it with headphones but with caution when i hear it i have a feeling in my throat it just begins to vibrate be very careful now this part is absolutely useless you can actually select this part and delete it or if you absolutely want to create a preset just add something here that does that for you so let&#39;s add one more parametric equalizer and click on this button now let&#39;s dial in 16 000 and we want it to be as sharp as possible so let&#39;s choose 48 so it takes that away and there you have it you&#39;re recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems so here my friend we have a basic preset made do not forget to save it so click on this button to save this preset and let&#39;s name it dedicated to you all right because this is dedicated to you hit ok now anytime i load any audio all i have to do first of all let&#39;s say this is empty this is the before this is amazed from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better all we have to do is to choose that where it is as you can see i have made tons and tons and tons of preset and that was just a basic preset that i created for you but for my personal use i have presets for different situations as you can see there is just so many on mesh preset one eight bass removal there&#39;s there&#39;s dinda there is if you just come down there would be picks imperfect one two three four there are some testing presets there are some presets for different microphones it is just crazy as to how many presets i have created anyway let&#39;s jump to dedicate it to you this is what you have to do and now play it it&#39;s going to be loaded right there hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording and anytime you load an audio just load this preset and then work on just two things first one is spectral denoise just open that and for your audio train it differently so let&#39;s say this is the noise in your audio just select that click on learn let it learn then turn off learn and just control how much you want to reduce it okay also then control the amplify so that the audio is between -6 and -12 also we will learn the best way to fix room noise let&#39;s now right now the other ones are on so if you load this preset in this case after everything is on just make sure this is image from perfect and clipping and it&#39;s somewhere in the red audio recording we&#39;re going to it&#39;s somewhere in the red area a little bit i represent not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore problems like mouth noise in the end it also helps if you play with amplify so let&#39;s go to amplify pixim perfect and in this audio recording hi there this is umesh from bix imperfect and in this video recording hi there this is umesh if i change it to zero see what happens hi there this is umesh from big simple it&#39;s a little different have a look it when it was three hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect now let&#39;s change it to zero hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio it&#39;s a little more cleaner now after you have done that simply apply the preset after you made the changes according to your audio just apply that now if the audio comes to be a little inverted don&#39;t worry you can just go to stereo imagery graphic phase shifter and you can just set it probably a little lower okay and then process it apply it again so it&#39;s a little bit in the middle workable anyway so after you have done that we need to normalize the audio but before normalize it we need to just remove the excessive peaks so where are the peaks they are around minus three minus four so select all go to effect amplitude and compression hard limiter so it&#39;s around -4 choose that applied so the excessiveness is gone now let&#39;s go to effect amplitude and compression and then normalize let&#39;s set it to 96 percent 1996 percent let&#39;s go for 92 apply so there you have standard volume audio let&#39;s play it hi there this is umesh from pixim perfect and in this audio recording we are going to learn not only how to make your voice sound better but also learn how to fix certain problems like sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore now there&#39;s a major disclaimer the complete setup that i showed you sounds great on my voice to me again for some people this might not sound as good so this sounds great to me for your voice there might be some different little tweaks that you might have to do if you find that this audio is too bright just take down the highs a little bit if you need more bass just increase the bass a little bit in the equalizer if you need more compression just increase it a little bit more you get the point there so there you go that&#39;s my entire setup for audio this video like many other videos have not been cheap to make besides it&#39;s not sponsored either actually adobe audition costs a lot i have to pay for it monthly rx 8 advanced wow i i had to pay for it out of my own pocket they are not sponsoring this video at all so as you can see the price is just ridiculous so i&#39;m still trying to recoup the costs on top of that four years of trial and errors to just find the perfect combination of the perfect settings for each scenario and each room so right now i&#39;m recording in the small room sometimes there&#39;s some other room so it takes a hell of time to perfect it and find something that you like for each situation i would truly appreciate if you could support pixem perfect to keep this content free please check out our patreon page at patreon.comperfect and if you become a member there are also some perks for it i hope you enjoyed this video and if you want me to do more videos like this please let me know in the comments thank you so much to our patreons for making this video possible in the first place without their support none of this would ever have been possible thank you so much again for watching i&#39;ll see you in my next one till then stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating [Music] you

Transcript for:Audio Editing and Optimizing Techniques

Transcript for:
Audio Editing and Optimizing Techniques