**Dynamics in Audio Editing: Understanding Sidechaining**

When it comes to audio editing, dynamics play a crucial role in shaping the sound of our tracks. In this article, we'll delve into the world of dynamics and explore how sidechaining can be used to control one track's audio based on another track's audio.

**Getting Started with Dynamics**

To start using dynamics in your audio editing software, you need to navigate to the "dynamics" section and choose an audio track. For this example, let's assume our game track is selected as "audio track one". Double-clicking on the dynamics tab will allow us to adjust various settings. By default, the compressor is set to be affected by its own audio rather than another track's audio. However, we want to use sidechaining to control the compressor based on the vocals track.

**Understanding Sidechaining**

Sidechaining allows us to take one track's audio and duck it or boost it based on the level of another track's audio. In this case, we're using the vocals track to control the game track. When the vocals hit a certain threshold, the compressor will reduce the volume of the game track. By turning on the sidechain, we can achieve a more natural sound where the volume is only reduced when the vocals are present.

**Adjusting Settings**

To adjust the settings, we need to enter the "listen" mode by double-clicking on the dynamics tab again. This will allow us to hear how the compressor affects the game track in real-time. We want to set the threshold to around -25, which means that when the vocals hit a level of -25 dB, the compressor will start reducing the volume of the game track. Next, we need to adjust the attack and release times. A quick attack time of under 1 millisecond will allow us to catch the transient of the vocal quickly, while a slow release time will help create a more natural sound.

**Visualizing the Effect**

By using the "bogey on our tail" feature, we can visualize how the compressor is affecting the game track. This will give us an idea of when the vocals are present and when they're not. By adjusting the settings, we can fine-tune the compression to achieve the desired sound.

**Additional Tips**

As we continue to tweak the settings, it's essential to keep in mind that the perfect balance between compression and breathing room is crucial. If we over-compress the audio, it may sound unnatural or fatiguing to listen to. On the other hand, if we under-compress the audio, it may not have enough punch.

To further enhance our sound, we can use EQ adjustments to bring out specific frequencies in the audio. In this case, we're using a high-pass filter to reduce the low-end of the gunshots and thicken up the midrange. By applying these subtle EQ adjustments, we can create a more balanced and polished sound.

**Bandwidth Throttling: A Streaming Concern**

When it comes to streaming and uploading videos, bandwidth throttling is a common issue that many content creators face. This occurs when internet service providers (ISPs) slow down your upload speeds due to the amount of data being transmitted. However, with the use of VPNs like NordVPN, which is now upgrading to co-located servers with faster browsing experiences and improved security, content creators can avoid this issue.

**NordVPN: A Secure and Reliable Option**

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**Conclusion**

In conclusion, understanding dynamics and sidechaining is essential for creating high-quality audio in your streaming and video editing setup. By using these techniques and adjusting settings to suit your specific needs, you can achieve a more natural sound with perfect balance between compression and breathing room. Additionally, staying secure online with NordVPN's co-located servers ensures that content creators can avoid bandwidth throttling issues and focus on creating engaging audio for their audiences.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni have been obsessed with building the perfect sound mix for your streams or videos and i think i found the secret sauce that basically everyone was missing and it's been wild testing it out just to see how big of a difference it makes both for vocals and for your game sound to be audible by viewers if you do game streaming finally viewers can hear everything happening in your game without it overpowering your voice and it could even give you an advantage in the game too if that's what you want this video is sponsored by nordvpn get two years plus one bonus month heavily discounted at the link below too much time is spent on encoding settings and visual flair and we're still talking about that major videos coming out about amd's encoder update and intel's new av-1 encoding that comes out later this week so get subscribed for that but i've been working on a series of audio guides this year to help you perfect your stream audio and this is to take it that that last mile towards perfection so make sure that you have the other steps nailed before you get here or you're going to be missing out on some stuff but we're going to jump in based on the leveling guide i provided in my last big audio guide here i recommended making sure that your game sound doesn't peak higher than minus 28 decibels with the range being from -42 db to 28 db minus 28 db or so the problem is when you crank your game sound down that low there is a ton of lost information that's either just too quiet to hear or now drowned out by your music or something else i specifically ran into this with my left 4 dead 2 videos over on lost saves a channel you should go subscribe to by the way where the cool little witch or charger sound effects that we added in with mods were just too inaudible if i kept the obnoxiously loud gunfire at a reasonable level in the video the thing is modern games have a massive dynamic range in their audio mixing they are you know designed they're tr they're trying to provide an immersive audio experience after all and not every sound is at the same level but what if it could be for this we're using a technique called upward compression i've covered normal compression on my previous audio processing tutorials numerous times normal downward compression that you would normally use for your vocals or for sidechaining game sound normally involves listening for audio to go above a certain loudness threshold and then squishing it down by the ratio this helps keep your loudest parts from being too far away from your average levels and reduces the dynamic range a bit but it has an impact on how the loudest parts actually sound typically this makes your audio sound a bit more punchy or radio-like if used too aggressively some people want this not everyone does however upward compression is the same kind of thing but flipped instead it takes any audio sitting below a loudness threshold and boosts it up by a set amount this has a much more significant impact on your dynamic range which you wouldn't want for actual like general movie mastering per se but it's very useful when you want all of a certain sound to be near the same volume level and to increase you know the levels of those weird ambient sounds since it's not affecting the louder parts of a sound at all it has minimal impact on actually changing the sound characteristics with any flavoring or coloration which is a really good thing this can be used on vocals as well for someone who has a widely varied speaking speaking pattern i struggle with this a lot in my videos sometimes i'll start a new sentence or takes of a script with a lot more energy since i'm coming off a cut than the end of a sentence or later on in the video and traditional limiting or normalizing techniques either mean that i can't boost the quiet parts enough to even out the sound or the loudest parts end up sounding way too punchy or bassy as i you know basically run them up against the limiter in order to bring up the rest of the sound using an upward compressor here as a first step or at least first step after noise suppression or removal means literally just evening out my speaking levels then i can go through an eq apply my normal compression steps and things like that this means that my videos and streams in the future should actually have a much more even speaking level without being too aggressively punchy as some people have complained about which was just a nature of trying to make sure i can hear you how does this impact your game sound well the same applies there if you squish down the super loud parts of your stream often gunshots explosions or goal scoring then the footsteps or the in-game announcer moments aren't audible to the viewer and that creates a kind of weird disconnect when you start referencing those little moments and the viewer can't actually hear them plus it does make those louder parts more punchy with which for something like a first person shooter with a bunch of gunshots becomes really tedious you're like tiring to listen to by flattening out your game sound for the viewer you're much more easily able to control the levels of your gain sound in reference to your vocals and things like that let's look at this in action for this i'm showing both a free and a paid vst the free one is x-firs ott and it's a clone of an old over-the-top compressor that was used in dubstep and similar music genres and then the paid one is waves mv2 which was what i first was recommended when i started down this rabbit hill i will say my annoyance with these more supposedly user-friendly plug-ins is that they lack a lot of the control you might want if you understand how a compressor or other tools work you don't have ratios or normal threshold numbers or attack and release times hell waves even calls it low-level compression instead of upward compression which is what most of the industry calls it this is the same reason i don't like things like the dbx286s channel strip unit it uses dumb non-industry standard namings for things and approaches for things that teaches bad habits for example by only having high frequency and low frequency boost for eq instead of cuts that kind of thing but the good paid upward compression vst is almost 200 so we're not going to bother i'll show you how to make this work for exactly what you need all right before we get any further i just wanted to note that the point of this video was to show you doing it both live in obs and in a video and the the plug-ins don't work in obs and any of the vst hosts i found also don't work with the plugins or don't work with obs and so i'm giving up on the live aspect for now so this tutorial is primarily for videos rather than live streaming but if i come up with a better solution for live it'll be its own video all right to get started with this i am going to open up a video project with some gameplay footage and some audio in davinci resolve this is a free video editor the version 18 just came out exciting stuff however vst support also exists in premiere pro i believe in magix vegas as well so you have lots of options available to you as long as vsts are an option here you can see here we have a sample capture of some battlefield 1 on playstation 5 with the game sound and then my microphone captured separately on the second track now the game sound was originally super super quiet so i amped it up because befo for this you want to start at basically a zero volume change place to really get the best results and so you want volume kind of cranked up but we pl if we play it back normally bogey on our tail obviously it's overbearing our audio now based on the previous graphic that i showed you before that means we come down here and crank it to like minus 24. get on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close that allows our vocals to shine through and the obnoxiously loud plane gunshots to not be too overpowering but it means the cool plane sounds over here and some of the vocals over here about taking objective apple are barely audible so we don't want to do that turn your volume slider back up to zero you want to start like i said at basically a zeroed out starting place to get the best results here and instead we're gonna use some vst filters i mentioned the ott one as well as the mv2 now if your vsts aren't showing up after you installed them go to resolve preferences audio plugins and make sure it shows up here as loaded successfully and if it's the first time you launch resolve since installing the plugin you'll have to relaunch resolve premiere has a thing where you can like rescan after you've installed a new one and it's fine resolve needs relaunched but then you have a nice lovely list here we have ott which is the free one and then we have mb2 from waves there's a mono and a stereo option all game sound to stereo in 90 of cases so you just want the stereo one now i actually recommend doing all of your audio processing on a track by track basis so for example all of my voiceover is on audio track 2 here and i actually have a limiter applied so i can limit all of my vocals and process it normally for this example i'm going to drag it to the individual files so i can show you before and afters easily for the edit but i do recommend just dragging effects straight onto the track to have an easier time choose your plug-in we'll start with the free one because i have had a ton of issues getting this to work with obs and anything so i don't even know that it will work here but it might it works thank goodness okay so this is ott there is an unofficial manual i will have linked down below which helps you kind of walk through things because it's a little weird looking compared to some of the other plugins but effectively these are your meters for your high medium and low volume frequencies and then you have your upward and downward compression as a percentage because they're weird depth is how much of the audio is being passed through it's basically like a wet and dry mix time is your attack and release time at the same time then you have input and output gain as well which is you know input gain and makeup gain so if we have it set on our tail i don't think you can see specifically we have a lot of lower frequencies that are actually getting boosted and so we can tweak these manually with basically like a little eq here and that like thins it out but it doesn't reduce it so it makes it so it's not super bassy or punchy it doesn't actually reduce the volume so for that we want the upward compression which is the lower sound so with this we want to set the upward compression to like 140 percent bogey on our tail and actually i'm gonna mute our vocal track we want to focus on the game sound you want this quiet part to be just as loud or close not perfectly just as loud but you know close to the louder sections and so keep an eye on your mixer levels over here you can see the super loud gunshots gets to about here but the quiet part is only a little bit lower so maybe a little bit more up a little bit more upward compression and with that we have a much more balanced audio mix and now we can apply a limiter or even use the output gain to reduce it all to a volume that's acceptable to have under our voiceover so with output gain we have a range all the way down to minus 48db so i'm going to say let's go to minus 28. can i i can't type oh but we can scroll uh i hate these dials digital dials are dumb alright minus 28 db so now when we play a bag it's all one volume but it's locked to a maximum of minus 28 db i don't think we need to go that low we can come back up to since it's all one volume there's not any variety it's a lot easier to nail down the exact range you want because with those peaks it's hard to figure out exactly how low you need to go for those individual peaks to go low enough so we can try minus 23 and we're going to unmute our vocals now so we can see how the balance is pokey on our tail and we can start turning it up i don't think i'm even coming close there we go that might be a little too much oh i can't turn because and i'm actually going to use the eq with this particular tool to turn down the high frequencies just a tiny bit so any of those abrasive like higher pitched sounds aren't emphasized here bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close i like that i like that a lot and as a visualization i can show you a before and after so i'm going to clone all of this over here this is going to be our after and this is our before so i'm actually going to compound this this is going to be before and this is going to be after now look at those differences once it applies the effects in fact our vocals are a little louder than before uh we'll need to tweak that a little bit because it doesn't have the track audio limiter here but you can see here super quiet through here big loud game sound and without the vocals it would be if we decompose this actually we're just going to undo all of that we're only going to compose the game sounds we can look at so this is before and now this is after with the vst applied you can see here very quiet very loud kind of variety quiet quiet quiet and then back to loud and this is a mostly consistent wall of sound that is a lot easier to tame this should help you kind of visualize what it is we're doing here now that was with ott i actually prefer the mv2 plug-in instead so i'm going to show you that as well again it's about 30 40 bucks not a huge deal but i understand if not everyone wants it for free i'm gonna apply that to the track and now this is a very different interface this one is a little annoying because it works with a different version of loudness metering than i have taught you before or then i'm even really used to working with for a low level stuff it works from a range of 0 to 48 dbfs and for high level it works from 0 to -48 dbfs and i haven't really messed with that before you know i mean i mean i have but like not a ton in the tutorials and so you kind of got to play with your levels and the output levels to see what you're boosting so again we're going to mute our vocals and i'm going to play it back i'm going to i'm going to start around 15. that's usually a good place to start and we're going to look at how much is boosting you can see it's not actually boosting it that much yet so we can closely go to about 20. i wouldn't go much higher than 20. and what's weird is this is both setting the threshold and the amount that it's boosting you don't get to control the threshold very much which is a little annoying like with the love for dead videos it was picking up a lot of like the crickets and the rain and that got really abrasive and i ended up having to filter that out a little bit but with most games it's probably fine now the gunshots are still really loud so i would actually use the high level compressor to reduce those just a teeny tiny bit to make it a little more pleasant everything is now almost clipping it's all digital so it won't actually clip but it's a much more even wall of sound so now we can use the output here to drag this down to the minus 23-ish range that we wanted to stay below our vocals so now we me unmute our vocals bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close i mean turn that down a little bit more maybe hello turn oh that's a lot to me you produce a lot more consistent of a result with this but it may color the sound a little bit more because you can tell that was a little bit more punchy than this example of the after that we have already deleted but with the otd so that's before and this is after hello turn oh i can't turn because that way you still hear the announcer you still hear the cool plane sounds but it's a lot more even and we can do the same thing here where we show you the before and after of the waveform and you can see here actually we could do to boost the low level a little bit more so i'm going to undo that we're going to come into our settings we're going to take low level maybe plus 25. now we're going to compound that and see what that looks like maybe a little bit more you can just keep playing with it oh that's because it didn't actually save anything that's weird all right compound after opening timeline vs season resolve can be you can see here it's not actually saving the setting these scene resolves can be a little finicky if you start nesting them i honestly don't recommend nesting them cache audio effects i may not change it yeah it's not it's not saving the settings now so when you're actually doing it that's why i recommend applying it on a track but we're not done we're not done okay so we got the audio set up we're gonna turn this up a bit make sure we go to another clip come back all right that's applied so that's pretty cool and regardless of what plug-in you use that's the result that you can get but we can take it a step further and have it still get quieter when we talk than when we don't talk meaning that we can have it run a little louder still so the viewers can enjoy the immersion a little bit more until we start talking and that's through sidechaining i've showed how to do that in obs before tutorials are linked below but i'm going to show you how to do it and resolve here because it's pretty interesting now premiere actually has with the essential audio panel a auto ducking capability that you can set up resolves is a little more funky so i'm going to show you how to do that here because not a lot of people talk about it and we're going to use still this section of video and audio as our example keep in mind the goal of this is to have it be louder when i'm not talking than when i am talking which means that we want our overall output level to probably be higher than we'd normally set it so we have minus 24 applied here because we want everything at that but if we're auto ducking we may want the parts when we're not talking to be closer to minus 18 and then the rest will be closer to minus 21. so i'm gonna play with it here hello turn yeah that's that's about pretty good so i'm going to increase my output gain to minus 18 from -24 and then we're going to go into fairlight fairlight is built in to resolve it's a whole audio processing suite it gets pretty intimidating don't worry about it too much all i'm gonna show you is how to make this track duck under this track so to do so identify which track is your vocals track which for me is audio too you can actually rename these tracks by the way if it helps you out so we have vocals in game with vocalstrack which is audio track 2 we identify audio track 2 and our mixer over here if that's hiding come over here mixer and double click in this area that says dynamics don't affect anything else just hit the send button so it shows up as yellow now go to your game track which for me is audio track one double click in the dynamics and choose listen now what this does is it has the compressor for your game track being affected by the vocals track rather than its own audio so i've showed you compression before on how it you know adjust based on the threshold of the audio this time it's adjusting based on the threshold of another track's audio that is what the listen is for so now we turn on the compressor and now we can do a similar thing so we want as soon as our vocals hit say -25 i want it to attack very quickly under one millisecond and release very slowly so that's at 500 you could mess with 200 i have recommended settings in the sidechaining obs disc or tutorial if you're interested in that and now listen to what happens bogey on our tail you've even got a visual here i don't think i'm even coming close you can see here it shows where the audio normally is and then as this track starts making noise it bumps it down hello turn and so you can go all the way up to 20 to one if you think that's necessary you can also decrease the threshold if you start if you feel the quieter parts of your voice aren't being compensated for here hello turn oh i can't turn because now when it comes to the attack and release you want it to attack very very quickly so that as soon as you start talking it reduces it but then you want the release to be very slow so it's a natural just kind of slow curve upwards instead of jumping up and down because if i set the release like really short here it's going to feel really jumpy hello turn oh i can't turn because you can see here it's just bouncing up and down between words and that can be really fatiguing to listen to so i recommend half a second which is 500 milliseconds or even longer to just allow it to slowly come back up bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close hello turn oh i can't turn because and now with this we have what i consider to be obviously you can play with levels you can even filter it a bit like this is really punchy with the low end so we could come in here with the eq on it and cut out some of that low end and come in here with uh actually it has a high pass filter right here i don't think i'm even coming close and we may want a high-pass filter as well hello turn oh i can't turn because so that it's only in the mids bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close we have taken objective hello turn oh i can't turn cause obviously it thins the sample out a little bit you lose a little bit of the character bogey on our tail but we've now taken that extra bassy punch out of the gunshots which might be might be fatiguing for a longer video i don't think i'm even coming close and now we have what i consider to be like the perfect audio sample for a gameplay video where all of the audio is mostly the same volume so viewers can hear everything and it ducks beneath you i mean ultimately that's that's what you want right the perfect listening experience for your viewers if you're getting into a bunch of streaming and video uploading you might run into a problem that i had when i first moved into our new space here isp bandwidth throttling link it's not fun with nordvpn however that's no longer an issue nordvpn is actually upgrading to co-located in 10 gig servers meaning we're going to have even faster browsing experiences and you know throughput which is wild plus all of their server nodes are diskless meaning that they don't store any of your configuration or your data on site which is very important you can even route your traffic through a second vpn server for double the encryption if that's if that's your thing i've been using nordvpn to stay secure online and keep from being throttled since moving into our new house well to keep him from getting bandwidth throttled at least the heatwave is thermal throttling me like crazy you can try it out with a 30-day risk-free money-back guarantee and get a two-year plus one additional month bundle for a massive discount at nordvpn.com they they can't protect you from the heat unfortunately though so stay safe out there y'all if you're wanting to continue down this audio rabbit hole be sure to check out this playlist here with a lot more guides on this very subject to perfect your stream and video audio or check out this guide on picking a camera for streaming if you're ready to tackle video i'm addie the stream professor and be kind rewindi have been obsessed with building the perfect sound mix for your streams or videos and i think i found the secret sauce that basically everyone was missing and it's been wild testing it out just to see how big of a difference it makes both for vocals and for your game sound to be audible by viewers if you do game streaming finally viewers can hear everything happening in your game without it overpowering your voice and it could even give you an advantage in the game too if that's what you want this video is sponsored by nordvpn get two years plus one bonus month heavily discounted at the link below too much time is spent on encoding settings and visual flair and we're still talking about that major videos coming out about amd's encoder update and intel's new av-1 encoding that comes out later this week so get subscribed for that but i've been working on a series of audio guides this year to help you perfect your stream audio and this is to take it that that last mile towards perfection so make sure that you have the other steps nailed before you get here or you're going to be missing out on some stuff but we're going to jump in based on the leveling guide i provided in my last big audio guide here i recommended making sure that your game sound doesn't peak higher than minus 28 decibels with the range being from -42 db to 28 db minus 28 db or so the problem is when you crank your game sound down that low there is a ton of lost information that's either just too quiet to hear or now drowned out by your music or something else i specifically ran into this with my left 4 dead 2 videos over on lost saves a channel you should go subscribe to by the way where the cool little witch or charger sound effects that we added in with mods were just too inaudible if i kept the obnoxiously loud gunfire at a reasonable level in the video the thing is modern games have a massive dynamic range in their audio mixing they are you know designed they're tr they're trying to provide an immersive audio experience after all and not every sound is at the same level but what if it could be for this we're using a technique called upward compression i've covered normal compression on my previous audio processing tutorials numerous times normal downward compression that you would normally use for your vocals or for sidechaining game sound normally involves listening for audio to go above a certain loudness threshold and then squishing it down by the ratio this helps keep your loudest parts from being too far away from your average levels and reduces the dynamic range a bit but it has an impact on how the loudest parts actually sound typically this makes your audio sound a bit more punchy or radio-like if used too aggressively some people want this not everyone does however upward compression is the same kind of thing but flipped instead it takes any audio sitting below a loudness threshold and boosts it up by a set amount this has a much more significant impact on your dynamic range which you wouldn't want for actual like general movie mastering per se but it's very useful when you want all of a certain sound to be near the same volume level and to increase you know the levels of those weird ambient sounds since it's not affecting the louder parts of a sound at all it has minimal impact on actually changing the sound characteristics with any flavoring or coloration which is a really good thing this can be used on vocals as well for someone who has a widely varied speaking speaking pattern i struggle with this a lot in my videos sometimes i'll start a new sentence or takes of a script with a lot more energy since i'm coming off a cut than the end of a sentence or later on in the video and traditional limiting or normalizing techniques either mean that i can't boost the quiet parts enough to even out the sound or the loudest parts end up sounding way too punchy or bassy as i you know basically run them up against the limiter in order to bring up the rest of the sound using an upward compressor here as a first step or at least first step after noise suppression or removal means literally just evening out my speaking levels then i can go through an eq apply my normal compression steps and things like that this means that my videos and streams in the future should actually have a much more even speaking level without being too aggressively punchy as some people have complained about which was just a nature of trying to make sure i can hear you how does this impact your game sound well the same applies there if you squish down the super loud parts of your stream often gunshots explosions or goal scoring then the footsteps or the in-game announcer moments aren't audible to the viewer and that creates a kind of weird disconnect when you start referencing those little moments and the viewer can't actually hear them plus it does make those louder parts more punchy with which for something like a first person shooter with a bunch of gunshots becomes really tedious you're like tiring to listen to by flattening out your game sound for the viewer you're much more easily able to control the levels of your gain sound in reference to your vocals and things like that let's look at this in action for this i'm showing both a free and a paid vst the free one is x-firs ott and it's a clone of an old over-the-top compressor that was used in dubstep and similar music genres and then the paid one is waves mv2 which was what i first was recommended when i started down this rabbit hill i will say my annoyance with these more supposedly user-friendly plug-ins is that they lack a lot of the control you might want if you understand how a compressor or other tools work you don't have ratios or normal threshold numbers or attack and release times hell waves even calls it low-level compression instead of upward compression which is what most of the industry calls it this is the same reason i don't like things like the dbx286s channel strip unit it uses dumb non-industry standard namings for things and approaches for things that teaches bad habits for example by only having high frequency and low frequency boost for eq instead of cuts that kind of thing but the good paid upward compression vst is almost 200 so we're not going to bother i'll show you how to make this work for exactly what you need all right before we get any further i just wanted to note that the point of this video was to show you doing it both live in obs and in a video and the the plug-ins don't work in obs and any of the vst hosts i found also don't work with the plugins or don't work with obs and so i'm giving up on the live aspect for now so this tutorial is primarily for videos rather than live streaming but if i come up with a better solution for live it'll be its own video all right to get started with this i am going to open up a video project with some gameplay footage and some audio in davinci resolve this is a free video editor the version 18 just came out exciting stuff however vst support also exists in premiere pro i believe in magix vegas as well so you have lots of options available to you as long as vsts are an option here you can see here we have a sample capture of some battlefield 1 on playstation 5 with the game sound and then my microphone captured separately on the second track now the game sound was originally super super quiet so i amped it up because befo for this you want to start at basically a zero volume change place to really get the best results and so you want volume kind of cranked up but we pl if we play it back normally bogey on our tail obviously it's overbearing our audio now based on the previous graphic that i showed you before that means we come down here and crank it to like minus 24. get on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close that allows our vocals to shine through and the obnoxiously loud plane gunshots to not be too overpowering but it means the cool plane sounds over here and some of the vocals over here about taking objective apple are barely audible so we don't want to do that turn your volume slider back up to zero you want to start like i said at basically a zeroed out starting place to get the best results here and instead we're gonna use some vst filters i mentioned the ott one as well as the mv2 now if your vsts aren't showing up after you installed them go to resolve preferences audio plugins and make sure it shows up here as loaded successfully and if it's the first time you launch resolve since installing the plugin you'll have to relaunch resolve premiere has a thing where you can like rescan after you've installed a new one and it's fine resolve needs relaunched but then you have a nice lovely list here we have ott which is the free one and then we have mb2 from waves there's a mono and a stereo option all game sound to stereo in 90 of cases so you just want the stereo one now i actually recommend doing all of your audio processing on a track by track basis so for example all of my voiceover is on audio track 2 here and i actually have a limiter applied so i can limit all of my vocals and process it normally for this example i'm going to drag it to the individual files so i can show you before and afters easily for the edit but i do recommend just dragging effects straight onto the track to have an easier time choose your plug-in we'll start with the free one because i have had a ton of issues getting this to work with obs and anything so i don't even know that it will work here but it might it works thank goodness okay so this is ott there is an unofficial manual i will have linked down below which helps you kind of walk through things because it's a little weird looking compared to some of the other plugins but effectively these are your meters for your high medium and low volume frequencies and then you have your upward and downward compression as a percentage because they're weird depth is how much of the audio is being passed through it's basically like a wet and dry mix time is your attack and release time at the same time then you have input and output gain as well which is you know input gain and makeup gain so if we have it set on our tail i don't think you can see specifically we have a lot of lower frequencies that are actually getting boosted and so we can tweak these manually with basically like a little eq here and that like thins it out but it doesn't reduce it so it makes it so it's not super bassy or punchy it doesn't actually reduce the volume so for that we want the upward compression which is the lower sound so with this we want to set the upward compression to like 140 percent bogey on our tail and actually i'm gonna mute our vocal track we want to focus on the game sound you want this quiet part to be just as loud or close not perfectly just as loud but you know close to the louder sections and so keep an eye on your mixer levels over here you can see the super loud gunshots gets to about here but the quiet part is only a little bit lower so maybe a little bit more up a little bit more upward compression and with that we have a much more balanced audio mix and now we can apply a limiter or even use the output gain to reduce it all to a volume that's acceptable to have under our voiceover so with output gain we have a range all the way down to minus 48db so i'm going to say let's go to minus 28. can i i can't type oh but we can scroll uh i hate these dials digital dials are dumb alright minus 28 db so now when we play a bag it's all one volume but it's locked to a maximum of minus 28 db i don't think we need to go that low we can come back up to since it's all one volume there's not any variety it's a lot easier to nail down the exact range you want because with those peaks it's hard to figure out exactly how low you need to go for those individual peaks to go low enough so we can try minus 23 and we're going to unmute our vocals now so we can see how the balance is pokey on our tail and we can start turning it up i don't think i'm even coming close there we go that might be a little too much oh i can't turn because and i'm actually going to use the eq with this particular tool to turn down the high frequencies just a tiny bit so any of those abrasive like higher pitched sounds aren't emphasized here bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close i like that i like that a lot and as a visualization i can show you a before and after so i'm going to clone all of this over here this is going to be our after and this is our before so i'm actually going to compound this this is going to be before and this is going to be after now look at those differences once it applies the effects in fact our vocals are a little louder than before uh we'll need to tweak that a little bit because it doesn't have the track audio limiter here but you can see here super quiet through here big loud game sound and without the vocals it would be if we decompose this actually we're just going to undo all of that we're only going to compose the game sounds we can look at so this is before and now this is after with the vst applied you can see here very quiet very loud kind of variety quiet quiet quiet and then back to loud and this is a mostly consistent wall of sound that is a lot easier to tame this should help you kind of visualize what it is we're doing here now that was with ott i actually prefer the mv2 plug-in instead so i'm going to show you that as well again it's about 30 40 bucks not a huge deal but i understand if not everyone wants it for free i'm gonna apply that to the track and now this is a very different interface this one is a little annoying because it works with a different version of loudness metering than i have taught you before or then i'm even really used to working with for a low level stuff it works from a range of 0 to 48 dbfs and for high level it works from 0 to -48 dbfs and i haven't really messed with that before you know i mean i mean i have but like not a ton in the tutorials and so you kind of got to play with your levels and the output levels to see what you're boosting so again we're going to mute our vocals and i'm going to play it back i'm going to i'm going to start around 15. that's usually a good place to start and we're going to look at how much is boosting you can see it's not actually boosting it that much yet so we can closely go to about 20. i wouldn't go much higher than 20. and what's weird is this is both setting the threshold and the amount that it's boosting you don't get to control the threshold very much which is a little annoying like with the love for dead videos it was picking up a lot of like the crickets and the rain and that got really abrasive and i ended up having to filter that out a little bit but with most games it's probably fine now the gunshots are still really loud so i would actually use the high level compressor to reduce those just a teeny tiny bit to make it a little more pleasant everything is now almost clipping it's all digital so it won't actually clip but it's a much more even wall of sound so now we can use the output here to drag this down to the minus 23-ish range that we wanted to stay below our vocals so now we me unmute our vocals bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close i mean turn that down a little bit more maybe hello turn oh that's a lot to me you produce a lot more consistent of a result with this but it may color the sound a little bit more because you can tell that was a little bit more punchy than this example of the after that we have already deleted but with the otd so that's before and this is after hello turn oh i can't turn because that way you still hear the announcer you still hear the cool plane sounds but it's a lot more even and we can do the same thing here where we show you the before and after of the waveform and you can see here actually we could do to boost the low level a little bit more so i'm going to undo that we're going to come into our settings we're going to take low level maybe plus 25. now we're going to compound that and see what that looks like maybe a little bit more you can just keep playing with it oh that's because it didn't actually save anything that's weird all right compound after opening timeline vs season resolve can be you can see here it's not actually saving the setting these scene resolves can be a little finicky if you start nesting them i honestly don't recommend nesting them cache audio effects i may not change it yeah it's not it's not saving the settings now so when you're actually doing it that's why i recommend applying it on a track but we're not done we're not done okay so we got the audio set up we're gonna turn this up a bit make sure we go to another clip come back all right that's applied so that's pretty cool and regardless of what plug-in you use that's the result that you can get but we can take it a step further and have it still get quieter when we talk than when we don't talk meaning that we can have it run a little louder still so the viewers can enjoy the immersion a little bit more until we start talking and that's through sidechaining i've showed how to do that in obs before tutorials are linked below but i'm going to show you how to do it and resolve here because it's pretty interesting now premiere actually has with the essential audio panel a auto ducking capability that you can set up resolves is a little more funky so i'm going to show you how to do that here because not a lot of people talk about it and we're going to use still this section of video and audio as our example keep in mind the goal of this is to have it be louder when i'm not talking than when i am talking which means that we want our overall output level to probably be higher than we'd normally set it so we have minus 24 applied here because we want everything at that but if we're auto ducking we may want the parts when we're not talking to be closer to minus 18 and then the rest will be closer to minus 21. so i'm gonna play with it here hello turn yeah that's that's about pretty good so i'm going to increase my output gain to minus 18 from -24 and then we're going to go into fairlight fairlight is built in to resolve it's a whole audio processing suite it gets pretty intimidating don't worry about it too much all i'm gonna show you is how to make this track duck under this track so to do so identify which track is your vocals track which for me is audio too you can actually rename these tracks by the way if it helps you out so we have vocals in game with vocalstrack which is audio track 2 we identify audio track 2 and our mixer over here if that's hiding come over here mixer and double click in this area that says dynamics don't affect anything else just hit the send button so it shows up as yellow now go to your game track which for me is audio track one double click in the dynamics and choose listen now what this does is it has the compressor for your game track being affected by the vocals track rather than its own audio so i've showed you compression before on how it you know adjust based on the threshold of the audio this time it's adjusting based on the threshold of another track's audio that is what the listen is for so now we turn on the compressor and now we can do a similar thing so we want as soon as our vocals hit say -25 i want it to attack very quickly under one millisecond and release very slowly so that's at 500 you could mess with 200 i have recommended settings in the sidechaining obs disc or tutorial if you're interested in that and now listen to what happens bogey on our tail you've even got a visual here i don't think i'm even coming close you can see here it shows where the audio normally is and then as this track starts making noise it bumps it down hello turn and so you can go all the way up to 20 to one if you think that's necessary you can also decrease the threshold if you start if you feel the quieter parts of your voice aren't being compensated for here hello turn oh i can't turn because now when it comes to the attack and release you want it to attack very very quickly so that as soon as you start talking it reduces it but then you want the release to be very slow so it's a natural just kind of slow curve upwards instead of jumping up and down because if i set the release like really short here it's going to feel really jumpy hello turn oh i can't turn because you can see here it's just bouncing up and down between words and that can be really fatiguing to listen to so i recommend half a second which is 500 milliseconds or even longer to just allow it to slowly come back up bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close hello turn oh i can't turn because and now with this we have what i consider to be obviously you can play with levels you can even filter it a bit like this is really punchy with the low end so we could come in here with the eq on it and cut out some of that low end and come in here with uh actually it has a high pass filter right here i don't think i'm even coming close and we may want a high-pass filter as well hello turn oh i can't turn because so that it's only in the mids bogey on our tail i don't think i'm even coming close we have taken objective hello turn oh i can't turn cause obviously it thins the sample out a little bit you lose a little bit of the character bogey on our tail but we've now taken that extra bassy punch out of the gunshots which might be might be fatiguing for a longer video i don't think i'm even coming close and now we have what i consider to be like the perfect audio sample for a gameplay video where all of the audio is mostly the same volume so viewers can hear everything and it ducks beneath you i mean ultimately that's that's what you want right the perfect listening experience for your viewers if you're getting into a bunch of streaming and video uploading you might run into a problem that i had when i first moved into our new space here isp bandwidth throttling link it's not fun with nordvpn however that's no longer an issue nordvpn is actually upgrading to co-located in 10 gig servers meaning we're going to have even faster browsing experiences and you know throughput which is wild plus all of their server nodes are diskless meaning that they don't store any of your configuration or your data on site which is very important you can even route your traffic through a second vpn server for double the encryption if that's if that's your thing i've been using nordvpn to stay secure online and keep from being throttled since moving into our new house well to keep him from getting bandwidth throttled at least the heatwave is thermal throttling me like crazy you can try it out with a 30-day risk-free money-back guarantee and get a two-year plus one additional month bundle for a massive discount at nordvpn.com they they can't protect you from the heat unfortunately though so stay safe out there y'all if you're wanting to continue down this audio rabbit hole be sure to check out this playlist here with a lot more guides on this very subject to perfect your stream and video audio or check out this guide on picking a camera for streaming if you're ready to tackle video i'm addie the stream professor and be kind rewind\n"