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building your home recording studio
how anyone can create professional sounding audio
hi this is Ken Theriot from Home Brew Audio
what do you think you'd have to do to record and produce professional
sounding audio
whether that be music voice-overs, etc.
do you think you'd need expensive microphones and interfaces and other
gear?
may do you think the only alternative is to go to a commercial recording studio
where the average hourly rate is fifty dollars
that's fifty dollars an hour!
well you're not alone
most people do
the truth is that with some basic knowledge
and not even hard knowledge
you can get professional sounding audio with gear costing less than one hundred
dollars
assuming you already have a computer
a normal everyday computer
before we talk about and hear and how to set things up properly this is really
important to know
good audio is not guaranteed
just because you bought a Neumann, which is a really expensive microphone
and/or Pro Tools HD
which is really expensive recording software
if you know what you're doing you can get decent audio from the cheapest gear
and i'll give you four tips for doing this. But lack of knowledge causes lots
of folks to produce really crappy audio
even with expensive gear
Now, I want to throw out a disclaimer here.
Better quality microphones and preamps and interfaces
do cost more
and they can and do create audio that is superior to what you can get from, say,
a plastic pc mic or something really cheap
but only if you know a bit about what you're doing
if you do know what you're doing
it is possible to produce
better audio with a plastic pc mic
then someone with no experience
using a setup costing...
wait for it...
a hundred times more
How can i be so specific? Because during the first Home Brew Audio podcast we
compared to sound quality of some spoken word stuff made with gear costing five
dollars
against a setup costing five hundred dollars
the result was obvious even to the most casual listener
the five dollars studio set up was better
much better. If you'd like to hear that for yourself check out our post where we
put up to audio samples of what i'm talking about
there's a link to it in the navigation bar at homebrewaudio.com
so what are the basics of the home recording studio
by the way i making an assumption here that we're not talking about a
stand-alone
uh... VS-880 type
of home recording studio. We're talking about a computer-based
home recording studio
So, here are the basics - a microphone of some kind
captures the sound
that sounds then converted into ones and zeros,
another way of saying digital audio,
by some sort of sound card or interface and then a recording program reads
the digital audio allowing you to edit and save, etc.
we've designated two types of computer based home recording studios
there's configuration one
and configuration two.
configuration one is a microphone plugged directly into the computer
either via the sound card or a usb port
Configuration two is a microphone plugged into a interface box or other
third-party device designed to accept a standard three-pin microphone cable
and then that interface goes into the computer
plus there's mobile recording
So the most basic of basic studios
will be a computer microphone
plug into a computer sound card -
configuration one -
along with some recording software on the computer
you can actually do that for about five dollars but it would be really hard to
get pro quality audio from that.
So how do we improve audio quality regardless of what configuration we're using
or what cost we're using?
yes even with that five dollar studio
There are some basics to getting the best quality audio
out of whatever gear you have, however cheap, and it all comes down to noise,
noise, noise.
we fight the noise first
we prevent as much of it getting into the recording as possible. One way to do
that is to use a cardioid microphone
another way is to get close to the microphone.
Then we fight the noise again - record as loud as you can without clipping. That
means without distorting,
which crowds out allot of the system nice
and then fight the noise again. After it's been recorded you use noise
reduction tools and some other techniques to reduce the noise that got
recorded which by the way is inevitable
so those of the four tips
and we will talk about those in a little bit more detail but why is fighting
noise the best way to improve audio quality? Well the biggest enemy of good
audio is noise
but we have to think of noise as being something different from what you might
normally think. We're not talking about just hiss and lawnmowers outside the
window and...
barking dogs and electrical hum and static and all that stuff.
Noise
is anything that isn't the thing that you are trying to record
that's called the signal
and noise can also include
echoes of the signal - a sort of reverby sound you sometimes hear. This is
usually referred to as
room sound.
So let's start with preventing the noise.
In a perfect world you have a great recording space where the room sound
actually complements the signal.
By the way, that's extraordinarily rare. Most home recording studios are in
bedrooms or spare rooms in the house which are basically rectangles are
squares and those are notoriously bad for producing room sound echo
so let's just assume that you don't have a great recording space 'cause hardly
anyone does
the second best option is to have a vocal isolation booth treated with
materials that are designed to
absorb echoes, allowing you to record only the signal,
significantly reducing the room sound noise.
that option is fairly difficult to do right and can be fairly expensive. Let's
take a look at some of these. Here are just a few examples of things you can do, you
can
buy
a vocal booth that's uh... premade and one example here is the clear sonic
IsoPac
that's eleven hundred dollars
another option is something like the Auralex MaxWall
which are basically modular pieces of acoustic foam that you can setup
over microphones stands and create your own little room
slightly less expensive at nine hundred ninety nine dollars
and there's something like the prime acoustic flexi groove which basically
gives you three sides that you can adjust
that will help absorb the sound and reduce room sound
and there's something called the sE Electronics Reflexion Filter, which is
a semi circular baffle made of several different kind of acoustic materials. You
can set this up on a microphone stand
then just position it immediately behind the microphone
and it will not only absorb the sound coming out of your mouth but it will
also help prevent the reflected sound in the room from coming back into the microphone.
and there's something like the harlan hogan portabooth
which is three hundred and forty nine dollars and that is something that's
designed to be portable so you can
take it on the road with you and as you can see from the picture here
it surrounds the microphone
doing pretty much the same job as the sE Electronics Reflexion Filter.
and then there is something that also there's a similar job but it doesn't
have as many of the different kinds of acoustic materials as in the reflexion
filter and that's the PrimAcoustic Voxguard which is about ninety dollars.
So those are some of the best, albeit
pretty expensive ways
to prevent noise getting into your recordings
but for many of us it's often impractical or too expensive to have
any of the above
most of us do our recording in a spare bedroom
and bedrooms are notoriously great at producing bad echoes that when added to
the signal -
your voice -
make the audio really bad
sound bounces off the hard surfaces all over the room, combining with each other
to amplify
or even delete certain parts of the main sound.
Then all these different mutant versions of your voice arrive at the microphone
along with the direct signal
usually all it slightly different times. Ick!
If you've watched a lot of internet videos were someone's narrating
give almost certainly heard this
in fact it is way too common at the video is really slick and professional
looking,
only to have poor audio layered over the top
usually it sounds like the person is speaking in a bathroom or something all
all echo-y and reverb-y.
In the case of talking head videos
this is caused by the fact that the narrator is almost always relying on the
built in camera mic
which is several feet away
so the first thing we have to do is deal with room noise before any sound reaches
the mic. The first thing you can do is use a mic with a cardioid pickup pattern.
Fortunately most mics default to that pattern.
These mics record only what's in front of them
They reject the sound that comes from behind and most of the sound coming from
the side
the next thing you can do is get your mouth close to the mic - like just a
couple of inches. This'll help the mic get mostly your voice
the signal
and less than the reflected sound - all the sounds bouncing off the walls
the noise
this is probably the most important thing you can do if you're recording
space is less than ideal
this is doubly true if you're shooting talking head video
next we make sure that were recording as loud as possible without distorting or
clipping.
A lot of people make this mistake. They record their voice at a low-level, and
then they raise the level after the fact
the problem is that there also raising the noise when they do this
so make sure to capture as high a level as possible of your voice in the first
place
you can use the gain level on your interface if you have one
or use the software mixer panel controls to do this
the next step in producing clean audio is to reduce the noise that will
inevitably be in a recording when our rooms are less than perfect
the way to do that is to use tools and recording software called noise
reduction
what noise reduction does is sample a section of the idea that is only noise
from areas where there's no voice talking
so it knows what noise looks like and hence what to turn down
then the program separates the noise from the signal
and get rid of it
ideally leaving the signal/voice unaffected
that last bit is really hard to do
there is usually some artifact left behind after noise reduction is
performed
it sounds like swirling water
so you have to play with the settings to find the right balance of noise
reduction without making the signal sound too weird
if you do all three of those things
you can get the best possible audio out of the cheapest possible gear.
it's what i did in the five dollar versus five hundred dollar thing. That's the
first answer to the question of how we move toward pro audio from the five
dollar set up
having a basic understanding of how to limit noise
now we can address that two of recording basics
the part where sound is converted to ones and zeros for digital audio
by a sound card or interface.
This is the main reason why the five-dollar plastic mic going into a
sound card is not the best idea
a microphone is very limited in how accurate it can be a since the
components are small and cheap and tend to be over sensitive the certain sounds
like p-pops and rumble and other low frequency stuff
and not sensitive enough to others then comes the fact
that the analog-to-digital converters built into integrated sound cards of
most computers
are of poor quality
then to top it all off immigrated sound cards tend to pick up a lot of the
electrical noise from the motherboard
so the best first step then is to avoid having to plug a microphone into an
integrated sound card
the fastest and most inexpensive way to do this is to use a usb microphone which
will have digital converters built right into it
making for a better quality conversion and avoiding much of the computer noise.
But the small headset usbs
uh... the ones that are under twenty five dollars, usually
are still really small and have the same accuracy in frequency response
limitations as other PC mics. This next upgrade is where you move into the
realm of professional quality audio.
you can improve the sound greatly by moving from the tiny usb headset mic
to larger usb mic like the samson Q1U
for only a few dollars more than the typical headset usb mic
It costs about forty nine dollars. You can then incrementally improve sound
quality by moving to a large diaphragm condenser usb mic
like the Samson C01U,
which is about eighty dollars.
Prices go up from there for large diaphragm condenser type USB mics.
By the way, you can pick up either of these mice that most Best Buy stores.
I find that even with the larger usb mics, you still get a low-level hiss,
usually so low you can only hear it and headphones,
but still a bit more than you want to have a few were sending a voice-over job
to a client.
But noise reduction programs usually can fix this quite well. That's because the
hiss is very low level and it's a very consistent kind of noise.
That brings up another point about audio quality.
With the basic knowledge we've been talking about
you can get top-notch audio quality from inexpensive gear
but it may take more time than if you have the expensive gear. Having to run
noise reduction on everything is one example
This is fine though for a lot of people as they frequently have more time
available than cash.
Then as you can afford to you can upgrade your studio in increments. But...
only if you need to you.
For most people, a large usb mic will give them as much audio quality as they will
ever need.
So that's home recording studio configuration one -
A microphone going directly into a computer.
You can enter the pro level of audio quality here,
but only if you have a usb mic that's larger than the headset type.