The Power of VST Plugins: Enhancing Audio Quality with Affordable Software

As I sit here recording my voice, I want to highlight an often-overlooked aspect of audio production: VST plugins. These software plugins can make a significant difference in the quality of your recordings, and I'm excited to share some tips on how to use them effectively.

Let's start by enabling the VST plugin and exploring its effects. When you enable the plugin, you'll notice a clear improvement in the sound of your voice. The mic is positioned quite far away from me, which can create a warm and bassy tone. However, with the plugin enabled, the sound becomes more balanced and crisp.

I must admit that I got a bit carried away with the plugin settings, but you get the idea! To achieve a more subtle effect, you'll need to play around with the sliders until your voice sounds just right. Increasing the highs will bring out the crispness in my voice, while decreasing the middle frequencies will make it sound more broadcasty.

One of the most noticeable effects of VST plugins is their ability to remove background noise and hiss from recordings. This can be especially useful when working with cheaper microphones or recording in a noisy environment. To do this, I simply click on the plus icon and select "Noise Suppression." You'll then have two options: RNN Noise and another algorithm. While RNN Noise is only available with a decent NVIDIA card, the other option works beautifully.

By setting the noise suppression level, you can effectively eliminate background noise from your recordings. However, be careful not to overdo it, as this can also affect the quality of your voice. In my case, I'm using a relatively cheap NVIDIA card, which may not be able to handle RNN Noise. Nonetheless, the other algorithm works well, and I've found that setting the level carefully allows me to achieve a great balance between removing noise and preserving the integrity of my voice.

Finally, there's one more trick up our sleeves: adding a limiter to our recordings. This plugin ensures that your audio never exceeds a certain volume, preventing distortion and maintaining clarity. By setting the threshold to -1 decibel or lower, you'll be able to catch even the loudest moments without sacrificing quality. If you're working with particularly loud sources, such as a screen capture from YouTube, adding a limiter can help keep your recordings under control.

If you're in the market for an affordable microphone and want to explore some of these techniques before investing in higher-end gear, I recommend checking out my comparison video on Amazon or Wish.com. In it, I compared seven cheap microphones to see which ones performed best, and I'm excited to share my findings with you.

In conclusion, VST plugins can be a game-changer for audio enthusiasts on a budget. By experimenting with different settings and techniques, you can unlock the full potential of your microphone and produce high-quality recordings that rival more expensive gear. Whether you're recording podcasts, vlogs, or music, these software tools are definitely worth exploring.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis microphone here is one of the most popular budget microphones and for a good reason it's only 25 dollars and it sounds really good now the reason people prefer some other budget mics for example the surotek one from my previous my comparison video is that it sounds very broadcasty like very low like the thing you hear right now however this mic is much cheaper and in this video i'm gonna show you how to make a mic like this sound warm and full and as close to what you're hearing right now with this mic here it also comes with a stand and i will add a link to this mic in the description because it's a really popular one it's a great option so let's first add this mic to obs because there are a few things i want to show you that are really important to make your mic sound better and a lot of people are skipping those so i'm gonna go over that first but i wanna add a mic here and this is what the firefighting mic is called on your pc let's click on okay so then the mic shows up in the audio mixer now i said i wanted to show you a few things before adding the effects right the first thing is really handy and it's that in these advanced audio properties you can find your mic and then you can change the monitor mode to monitor and output what this will do is it will let me preview my microphone in these headphones here so now i can clearly hear the mic in my headphones and if everything works fine you will be able to hear the mic too and the second really important thing i want to show you is the importance of mic placement there are a lot of people who put their mic somewhere like this behind the keyboard or next to the keyboard and i mean it works fine the only thing i need to do is turn up the gain a bit something like this and the thing not many people realize is how much better the sound gets when you put the mic closer to your mouth so you should definitely put the mic right in front of you on your desk and preferably you should get a cheap mic or this one here is a great example i think i bought this on amazon for about 15 so it comes with a dust clamp like this you just clamp this on your desk and then the mic arm itself is pretty light but definitely strong enough for these type of mics you just slide it in like this you tighten the screw on the bottom here and then if you want you can just detach the stand here connect it to the mic arm and it will definitely make a big difference because your voice will go from sounding like this to sounding like this now this definitely isn't necessary but i just wanted to show you because many people think a mic arm costs a hundred dollars or something like that there are definitely cheap options i will link this in the description but don't worry i will show you a bunch of filters and then effects afterwards that will make your mic sound very warm even if your mic is standing on your desk like this after this video it will sound amazing but first i'm obligated to show you the sponsor of today's video and it's an awesome one because it's a plugin for obs studio that's free to install this plugin that's called owned pro will give you access to a bunch of free overlays and as you can see with one click i can just install a complete overlay with transition with animations with alerts labels everything that you would ever need you can do it all in this plugin with complete packages but you can also just go here and then say owned alerts for example you click on ok then you click on ok again and this will be a window with your alerts in case you have your own overlay but you want your alerts or labels to a plugin now everything i showed you is completely free if you decide to upgrade the plugin you get more customization for your alerts but most importantly you get access to over 400 overlay packages as you see here i can just keep scrolling there are packages for everything every theme every color every event like christmas halloween all that stuff upgrading this plugin gives you access to everything you can just click on upgrade on top on the website itself you can also configure a bunch of stuff and if you click on subscribe now and on the checkout page you can enter my code tvn which will give you 50 of the price the longer you subscribe for on the left the cheaper it gets if you want to check out this free plugin the link is in my description and don't forget that my code tvn gives you 50 percent of the price and another reason some people think their mic sounds bad is that they are speaking into it the wrong way and these two mics here are the best example of it this mic here the sm7b needs to be spoken into from the top of this mic here the five fine records from the front of the mic so speaking into the mic the right way is really important because as you can see if i would speak into this firefight like i speak in my sm7b the sound would be very weird compared to how it's supposed to be and there's something else that's also really important in terms of how you speak into your mic so as i said make sure you position your mic the right way but then it's also important to know the polar pattern of your mic so you can just go to google and search for polar pattern what the polar pattern means is where your mic is recording sound from so most usb microphones are cardioid which means that they mainly record on the front of the mic here like this then a bit to the side and then they record as little as possible from the back here now i'll give you a clear example of why this is so important so i'm gonna look for the mic we're using today the fifon k6x9b and then i'm gonna type polar pattern so you should look up the mic that you are using right now and then try to find out the polar pattern as you can see here on the bottom polar pattern cardioid so that's what i said most usb mics are choreoid so in case of this mic here the front is recording my voice it records a lot from the front as you can see on this image here i am speaking into it from the top and then the back here is not recording much and that's very nice because the back is aimed at my keyboard so my keyboard sound won't be recorded as loud as my voice will and this is important because some mics are super cardio or hypercardioid and as you can see those are also recording a bit from the back of the mic so positioning it like this would get a lot of keyboard sound true and that's also a reason why some people position their microphones like this above them because on the front is recording your voice the back is not really aimed at anything and then the keyboard is beneath it but it doesn't really record from this way because it's mostly from the front and from the back so in case of this firefighting mic we can just position it like this this will do just fine so to recap position your mic as close to your mouth as possible and then look up how you should speak into your mic and what the polar pattern is so you can position it the right way and speak into it from the right direction and don't think that it isn't possible because lady gaga once did a live stream i think it was on twitch i'm not sure she was singing into the back of her 20 000 microphone yeah so once your mic placement is in check and you've added your microphone here in the audio settings the first thing you want to check is in your audio settings going to sounds then going to recording double clicking your microphone going to levels and i'm making sure that this isn't something like 3 or 4 etc because this sometimes happens especially with cheaper microphones and this will give you problems later on so let's make sure that this is at something like 90 or 100 or something in between you can choose that let's keep clicking on okay so once you've done all this then the level of your microphone should be something like this probably in the yellow maybe in the red maybe a bit in the green here and the first real big thing we're gonna do is making sure that the volume of your voice is always around the same level on stream so when you're talking quiet on stream obs will boost your voice and then when you're shouting on stream obs will pull it back so you're not blowing out viewers ears so if you pay attention to the audio mixer now when i thought quiet so something like this a bit quiet on stream then i'm around minus 25 minus 20 decibels but then let's say something falls on my stream or i shout as you see i'm going into the red this is speaking and that shouldn't happen so the way we're gonna add all kinds of effects here is by clicking on the settings icon here and then going to filters then on the left you can see plus and here we can add a bunch of filters we're gonna add a vst plugin later this will allow us to make our voice more warm and more full like a studio mic like this but before doing that we gotta fix our overall settings and we're gonna start with a compressor and this is something that looks kind of complicated but that's actually really easy so just follow me on this one we gotta do a few presets here you wanna change your ratio to four then move the threshold to zero decibels change the attack to two milliseconds then the release to one hundredth and then the next part is where everything will become clear i'm gonna move this a bit so it's pretty clear here i'm gonna zoom in on this part because now you gotta watch the levels here while you're talking and then you wanna change the output gain so i'm gonna switch to the cheap mic that we're setting up right now and what you gotta do now is you gotta talk really quiet and then you wanna change this output gain here till the quiet voice of you is going right here to something like the middle of the yellow maybe even to the start of the red if you want a really compressed and really edited voice but you can play around with this afterwards let's do it right now so i'm gonna talk really quiet and then i'm gonna up the volume here i'm gonna add some gain till the quiet voice is something like this to the middle or to the end of the yellow okay i'm gonna switch back to the sm7b now because as you can see when i talk loud now my voice is going into the red and it's peaking and definitely when i clap something like this it's gonna be way too loud so what we did now is we boosted our volume so when we're talking quiet on stream our volume will be loud enough but what's happening is our loud sounds are also boosted so now you wanna change the threshold here and you wanna pull it back till your loud sounds are going towards the end of the red and they aren't peaking so you wanna kinda shout you wanna make the loudest sound you would ever make on stream maybe laughing really loud maybe clapping your dust but you wanna make a loud sound so let's say we move it to -10 here as you can see it's still going into the red so let's pull it back to -15 and now it's not really peaking but it will be when i say hey okay see it's still too loud we want to pull it back even more let's say -20 hey okay so it didn't peak but when i shot a little bit louder hey it's still peak so i'm gonna pull it back even more let's say -24 hey okay so i think it's gonna be good now i'm gonna shout one more time hey as you see it didn't peak and then when i talk really quiet it's also right here around the yellow so i'm gonna show you the difference now so i'm gonna use my studio mic here but you gotta watch the volume i'm gonna disable the compressor i'm gonna talk quiet hey hey hey this is me quiet so we were around here right and then when i shout hey it's peaked completely into the rut so now when i enable the compressor hey hey this is really quiet it was around here and then hey my shouting is around here so that's perfect so this compressor part has been set up and now we've got a problem because our quiet sounds are being boosted which means that if i don't talk but i'm typing on my keyboard the quiet keyboard sounds will also be boosted so look at the mic aux here i'm gonna disable the compressor i'm gonna type my keyboard and then i'm gonna enable it and you're gonna see it boosting so as you see it went around here i'm gonna enable it now and now we go boost it till here so to fix this we gotta add a second filter and that's called an expander and what this will do is kind of the opposite maybe you know what a limiter is and an expander is kind of a fancy limiter so what it will do is it will only allow your microphone to pick up sound and to let sound true from the point that your sound reaches a certain level so a quiet sound like you typing on your keyboard will not be loud enough to really trigger the microphone but then when you start talking the volume is much higher i'm gonna show you how it works so same thing as before you wanna change the ratio to four then the threshold instead of completely to the right now you wanna move it completely to the left then change the attack to two milliseconds change the release to one hundredth and the gain you don't really want to touch that let's move it to zero here again so as long as our threshold here is at zero every sound will trigger the microphone so slightly tapping my desk or slightly touching my keyboard keys it will all trigger the mic however the more we move this threshold to the right the louder every sound will have to be to trigger the mic so in case i wasn't very clear what we're doing now is making sure that when you're not talking on stream when you're just gaming or there's a small pause or anything like that that no other sound in your room is triggering the mic while you are not talking so whatever the loudest sound will be besides your voice you wanna start making sound now i'm gonna type my keyboard then i'm gonna stop talking and i'm gonna move this threshold to the right until my keyboard sound isn't loud enough anymore to trigger the mic so you're gonna see how it works i'm gonna stop type the keyboard okay so the keyboard sound wasn't triggering the mic but as soon as i talk even when i talk really quiet the mic is picking up my voice this is the perfect scenario right it doesn't take that long to set up and it's awesome on stream because whenever i'm not talking no other things will start making noise and interrupt music that's playing or the game or whatever also by the way about the expander at this one testing right now and i feel like it's a bit too harsh so if you have this for yourself if you feel like the last letter or the first letter that you pronounced isn't really being recorded it's being cut off or the mic hasn't activated yet because it needs too much volume etc you can play around with this threshold here to make it a bit more smooth but what you also can do is play around with this ratio here and move it down to something like two to one or even one and a half to one the more you go to the left here the smoother the transition will be between opening your mic and closing it so if your last slider is being cut off moving it from four to one to two to one might completely fix that then to add a vst plugin we need to download one so when you add it as a filter here you can see vst plugins and here you will see a list of the ones you have and this will probably be empty for you now the one we're gonna download in this video is called marvel gq but this is the download page here and on top you can download the one for windows or mac if you're using that then once it's finished downloading you just install this you don't need to install this in an obs folder or something like that obs will just scan your pc and look for vst plugins so if this one is installed obs should find it so we're gonna click on finish then we're gonna go back to obs it's probably not gonna show up yet let's see i'm gonna delete the vst plugin here and then i'm gonna add a new vst plugin click on ok and let's see if it's in the list there we go marvel gq and it immediately shows up here in obs so now when you edit the vst is actually activated but you still need to set it up and to do that you want to click on open plugin interface and this is the plugin here and as i said before most cheap microphones don't have a lot of bass so you want to add it with a program like this so the left sliders here are to increase the low tones and around here in the middle will be your mid tones and then these will be your high tones when you double click them they reset to their original position as you see but you can also go to presets here and then choose session bank and then brighter and bassy here just closes after double clicking it and as you see now the high tones have been boosted and the low tones also a bit but the exact thing you do with these sliders here is not something i can show you because it depends on your microphone this mic here for example the pseudo tag that's extremely popular on my channel is a microphone that sounds very very very deep and warm but the high tones are kind of not really there so if i would be setting up this microphone here i would definitely not be boosting the low tones here i would be boosting the highs like this i will be boosting them a lot maybe that's too much maybe something like this however this firefight microphone has a lot of the crisp high sounds you clearly understand my voice but the bass isn't really there so for that i do something like this it's probably good to boost the highs a bit but with this firefight mic i would boost the low sounds a lot and i'm gonna let you hear how this sounds so i changed the sliders i boosted the low sounds a lot so you can clearly hear the difference right now i disabled the vst plugin so this is how it sounds and now i'm gonna enable the vst plugin and you clearly hear the difference now you also gotta know that the mic is pretty far away from me if you're gonna use a boom arm it's definitely gonna sound very warm and very bassy so this is how it sounds when i disable it and then this is how it sounds when i enable it now i kind of over did it it sounds like i'm on a radio station but you get what you can do with this so you want to play around with all these sliders here until the mic sounds like you want as you see when i increase the highs here this is what it does with my voice the crisp sound is coming to the front and with most microphones it also sounds good if you decrease the middle here a bit it's gonna sound more broadcasty like something like this okay so this sounds pretty good with most microphones this sounds much more warm now again it's too much you can decrease these a bit and then the microphone will sound very very decent so again this is without the plugin this is with the plugin now i over did these effects you want to make it more subtle but you clearly hear what this does it's very useful now something else that's very noticeable with these cheaper microphones and actually also expensive ones just because you're in a room is the background noise the constant sensing sound that you're hearing in this firefight mic right now we can easily get rid of that with a noise suppression filter so you click on the plus icon and then you choose noise suppression you click on ok and you're going to have two choices i think rnn noise is only available when you have a decent nvidia card but the other one is also very good you just click on this and then you got to set the noise suppression level but as you hear right now my voice still sounds very decent and the background noise is completely gone you can only hear my voice and you gotta play around with this level the more you suppress the background noise as i'm doing right now the lower quality your voice will become because it's getting suppressed along with noise if you have a decent nvidia core you can also use rnn noise this is ai based you can't really change the sliders etc and to be honest i still hear a bit of noise on the background maybe it's because it's a kind of cheap nvidia card i'm not sure i'm using this one here and it's much better now even though we added this compressor and the expander that manage how loud or how quiet our voices it's always possible that a clapping sound or something falling or you slamming your desk is pushing the volume to the maximum and the speaking into viewers ears so a total final fail-safe you can put on that is adding another filter the last one we're gonna add and adding a limiter now what this does is it simply completely limits your volume from going above a certain volume what the compressor did is basically making very loud sounds a bit more quiet however if it's very very very loud then making it a bit more quiet is still not going to help so that's where the limiter comes in you can set this at something like -1 decibels and then when you look at the meter it's gonna be impossible to make it peak all the way so i'm just gonna slam my desk and you're gonna see that it's impossible to make it peak as you saw this is the maximum if i move this threshold to -14 for example then when i slam as you see it doesn't go past this here it doesn't go past -14. so you can also put this on other sources like a screen capture for example if a youtube video is very loud you can add a limiter to the source that comes from youtube and then that way you can also limit that there's a lot of possibilities if you're still on the search for a cheap microphone i will link my my comparison video right here i bought seven cheap mics on amazon and i compared them all and one of my next videos is gonna be a wish.com my comparison video i bought very cheap microphones on which i'm comparing them all if you want to see that subscribe to the channel thank you so much for watching and i will see you or i hope i will see you in the next video have a nice daythis microphone here is one of the most popular budget microphones and for a good reason it's only 25 dollars and it sounds really good now the reason people prefer some other budget mics for example the surotek one from my previous my comparison video is that it sounds very broadcasty like very low like the thing you hear right now however this mic is much cheaper and in this video i'm gonna show you how to make a mic like this sound warm and full and as close to what you're hearing right now with this mic here it also comes with a stand and i will add a link to this mic in the description because it's a really popular one it's a great option so let's first add this mic to obs because there are a few things i want to show you that are really important to make your mic sound better and a lot of people are skipping those so i'm gonna go over that first but i wanna add a mic here and this is what the firefighting mic is called on your pc let's click on okay so then the mic shows up in the audio mixer now i said i wanted to show you a few things before adding the effects right the first thing is really handy and it's that in these advanced audio properties you can find your mic and then you can change the monitor mode to monitor and output what this will do is it will let me preview my microphone in these headphones here so now i can clearly hear the mic in my headphones and if everything works fine you will be able to hear the mic too and the second really important thing i want to show you is the importance of mic placement there are a lot of people who put their mic somewhere like this behind the keyboard or next to the keyboard and i mean it works fine the only thing i need to do is turn up the gain a bit something like this and the thing not many people realize is how much better the sound gets when you put the mic closer to your mouth so you should definitely put the mic right in front of you on your desk and preferably you should get a cheap mic or this one here is a great example i think i bought this on amazon for about 15 so it comes with a dust clamp like this you just clamp this on your desk and then the mic arm itself is pretty light but definitely strong enough for these type of mics you just slide it in like this you tighten the screw on the bottom here and then if you want you can just detach the stand here connect it to the mic arm and it will definitely make a big difference because your voice will go from sounding like this to sounding like this now this definitely isn't necessary but i just wanted to show you because many people think a mic arm costs a hundred dollars or something like that there are definitely cheap options i will link this in the description but don't worry i will show you a bunch of filters and then effects afterwards that will make your mic sound very warm even if your mic is standing on your desk like this after this video it will sound amazing but first i'm obligated to show you the sponsor of today's video and it's an awesome one because it's a plugin for obs studio that's free to install this plugin that's called owned pro will give you access to a bunch of free overlays and as you can see with one click i can just install a complete overlay with transition with animations with alerts labels everything that you would ever need you can do it all in this plugin with complete packages but you can also just go here and then say owned alerts for example you click on ok then you click on ok again and this will be a window with your alerts in case you have your own overlay but you want your alerts or labels to a plugin now everything i showed you is completely free if you decide to upgrade the plugin you get more customization for your alerts but most importantly you get access to over 400 overlay packages as you see here i can just keep scrolling there are packages for everything every theme every color every event like christmas halloween all that stuff upgrading this plugin gives you access to everything you can just click on upgrade on top on the website itself you can also configure a bunch of stuff and if you click on subscribe now and on the checkout page you can enter my code tvn which will give you 50 of the price the longer you subscribe for on the left the cheaper it gets if you want to check out this free plugin the link is in my description and don't forget that my code tvn gives you 50 percent of the price and another reason some people think their mic sounds bad is that they are speaking into it the wrong way and these two mics here are the best example of it this mic here the sm7b needs to be spoken into from the top of this mic here the five fine records from the front of the mic so speaking into the mic the right way is really important because as you can see if i would speak into this firefight like i speak in my sm7b the sound would be very weird compared to how it's supposed to be and there's something else that's also really important in terms of how you speak into your mic so as i said make sure you position your mic the right way but then it's also important to know the polar pattern of your mic so you can just go to google and search for polar pattern what the polar pattern means is where your mic is recording sound from so most usb microphones are cardioid which means that they mainly record on the front of the mic here like this then a bit to the side and then they record as little as possible from the back here now i'll give you a clear example of why this is so important so i'm gonna look for the mic we're using today the fifon k6x9b and then i'm gonna type polar pattern so you should look up the mic that you are using right now and then try to find out the polar pattern as you can see here on the bottom polar pattern cardioid so that's what i said most usb mics are choreoid so in case of this mic here the front is recording my voice it records a lot from the front as you can see on this image here i am speaking into it from the top and then the back here is not recording much and that's very nice because the back is aimed at my keyboard so my keyboard sound won't be recorded as loud as my voice will and this is important because some mics are super cardio or hypercardioid and as you can see those are also recording a bit from the back of the mic so positioning it like this would get a lot of keyboard sound true and that's also a reason why some people position their microphones like this above them because on the front is recording your voice the back is not really aimed at anything and then the keyboard is beneath it but it doesn't really record from this way because it's mostly from the front and from the back so in case of this firefighting mic we can just position it like this this will do just fine so to recap position your mic as close to your mouth as possible and then look up how you should speak into your mic and what the polar pattern is so you can position it the right way and speak into it from the right direction and don't think that it isn't possible because lady gaga once did a live stream i think it was on twitch i'm not sure she was singing into the back of her 20 000 microphone yeah so once your mic placement is in check and you've added your microphone here in the audio settings the first thing you want to check is in your audio settings going to sounds then going to recording double clicking your microphone going to levels and i'm making sure that this isn't something like 3 or 4 etc because this sometimes happens especially with cheaper microphones and this will give you problems later on so let's make sure that this is at something like 90 or 100 or something in between you can choose that let's keep clicking on okay so once you've done all this then the level of your microphone should be something like this probably in the yellow maybe in the red maybe a bit in the green here and the first real big thing we're gonna do is making sure that the volume of your voice is always around the same level on stream so when you're talking quiet on stream obs will boost your voice and then when you're shouting on stream obs will pull it back so you're not blowing out viewers ears so if you pay attention to the audio mixer now when i thought quiet so something like this a bit quiet on stream then i'm around minus 25 minus 20 decibels but then let's say something falls on my stream or i shout as you see i'm going into the red this is speaking and that shouldn't happen so the way we're gonna add all kinds of effects here is by clicking on the settings icon here and then going to filters then on the left you can see plus and here we can add a bunch of filters we're gonna add a vst plugin later this will allow us to make our voice more warm and more full like a studio mic like this but before doing that we gotta fix our overall settings and we're gonna start with a compressor and this is something that looks kind of complicated but that's actually really easy so just follow me on this one we gotta do a few presets here you wanna change your ratio to four then move the threshold to zero decibels change the attack to two milliseconds then the release to one hundredth and then the next part is where everything will become clear i'm gonna move this a bit so it's pretty clear here i'm gonna zoom in on this part because now you gotta watch the levels here while you're talking and then you wanna change the output gain so i'm gonna switch to the cheap mic that we're setting up right now and what you gotta do now is you gotta talk really quiet and then you wanna change this output gain here till the quiet voice of you is going right here to something like the middle of the yellow maybe even to the start of the red if you want a really compressed and really edited voice but you can play around with this afterwards let's do it right now so i'm gonna talk really quiet and then i'm gonna up the volume here i'm gonna add some gain till the quiet voice is something like this to the middle or to the end of the yellow okay i'm gonna switch back to the sm7b now because as you can see when i talk loud now my voice is going into the red and it's peaking and definitely when i clap something like this it's gonna be way too loud so what we did now is we boosted our volume so when we're talking quiet on stream our volume will be loud enough but what's happening is our loud sounds are also boosted so now you wanna change the threshold here and you wanna pull it back till your loud sounds are going towards the end of the red and they aren't peaking so you wanna kinda shout you wanna make the loudest sound you would ever make on stream maybe laughing really loud maybe clapping your dust but you wanna make a loud sound so let's say we move it to -10 here as you can see it's still going into the red so let's pull it back to -15 and now it's not really peaking but it will be when i say hey okay see it's still too loud we want to pull it back even more let's say -20 hey okay so it didn't peak but when i shot a little bit louder hey it's still peak so i'm gonna pull it back even more let's say -24 hey okay so i think it's gonna be good now i'm gonna shout one more time hey as you see it didn't peak and then when i talk really quiet it's also right here around the yellow so i'm gonna show you the difference now so i'm gonna use my studio mic here but you gotta watch the volume i'm gonna disable the compressor i'm gonna talk quiet hey hey hey this is me quiet so we were around here right and then when i shout hey it's peaked completely into the rut so now when i enable the compressor hey hey this is really quiet it was around here and then hey my shouting is around here so that's perfect so this compressor part has been set up and now we've got a problem because our quiet sounds are being boosted which means that if i don't talk but i'm typing on my keyboard the quiet keyboard sounds will also be boosted so look at the mic aux here i'm gonna disable the compressor i'm gonna type my keyboard and then i'm gonna enable it and you're gonna see it boosting so as you see it went around here i'm gonna enable it now and now we go boost it till here so to fix this we gotta add a second filter and that's called an expander and what this will do is kind of the opposite maybe you know what a limiter is and an expander is kind of a fancy limiter so what it will do is it will only allow your microphone to pick up sound and to let sound true from the point that your sound reaches a certain level so a quiet sound like you typing on your keyboard will not be loud enough to really trigger the microphone but then when you start talking the volume is much higher i'm gonna show you how it works so same thing as before you wanna change the ratio to four then the threshold instead of completely to the right now you wanna move it completely to the left then change the attack to two milliseconds change the release to one hundredth and the gain you don't really want to touch that let's move it to zero here again so as long as our threshold here is at zero every sound will trigger the microphone so slightly tapping my desk or slightly touching my keyboard keys it will all trigger the mic however the more we move this threshold to the right the louder every sound will have to be to trigger the mic so in case i wasn't very clear what we're doing now is making sure that when you're not talking on stream when you're just gaming or there's a small pause or anything like that that no other sound in your room is triggering the mic while you are not talking so whatever the loudest sound will be besides your voice you wanna start making sound now i'm gonna type my keyboard then i'm gonna stop talking and i'm gonna move this threshold to the right until my keyboard sound isn't loud enough anymore to trigger the mic so you're gonna see how it works i'm gonna stop type the keyboard okay so the keyboard sound wasn't triggering the mic but as soon as i talk even when i talk really quiet the mic is picking up my voice this is the perfect scenario right it doesn't take that long to set up and it's awesome on stream because whenever i'm not talking no other things will start making noise and interrupt music that's playing or the game or whatever also by the way about the expander at this one testing right now and i feel like it's a bit too harsh so if you have this for yourself if you feel like the last letter or the first letter that you pronounced isn't really being recorded it's being cut off or the mic hasn't activated yet because it needs too much volume etc you can play around with this threshold here to make it a bit more smooth but what you also can do is play around with this ratio here and move it down to something like two to one or even one and a half to one the more you go to the left here the smoother the transition will be between opening your mic and closing it so if your last slider is being cut off moving it from four to one to two to one might completely fix that then to add a vst plugin we need to download one so when you add it as a filter here you can see vst plugins and here you will see a list of the ones you have and this will probably be empty for you now the one we're gonna download in this video is called marvel gq but this is the download page here and on top you can download the one for windows or mac if you're using that then once it's finished downloading you just install this you don't need to install this in an obs folder or something like that obs will just scan your pc and look for vst plugins so if this one is installed obs should find it so we're gonna click on finish then we're gonna go back to obs it's probably not gonna show up yet let's see i'm gonna delete the vst plugin here and then i'm gonna add a new vst plugin click on ok and let's see if it's in the list there we go marvel gq and it immediately shows up here in obs so now when you edit the vst is actually activated but you still need to set it up and to do that you want to click on open plugin interface and this is the plugin here and as i said before most cheap microphones don't have a lot of bass so you want to add it with a program like this so the left sliders here are to increase the low tones and around here in the middle will be your mid tones and then these will be your high tones when you double click them they reset to their original position as you see but you can also go to presets here and then choose session bank and then brighter and bassy here just closes after double clicking it and as you see now the high tones have been boosted and the low tones also a bit but the exact thing you do with these sliders here is not something i can show you because it depends on your microphone this mic here for example the pseudo tag that's extremely popular on my channel is a microphone that sounds very very very deep and warm but the high tones are kind of not really there so if i would be setting up this microphone here i would definitely not be boosting the low tones here i would be boosting the highs like this i will be boosting them a lot maybe that's too much maybe something like this however this firefight microphone has a lot of the crisp high sounds you clearly understand my voice but the bass isn't really there so for that i do something like this it's probably good to boost the highs a bit but with this firefight mic i would boost the low sounds a lot and i'm gonna let you hear how this sounds so i changed the sliders i boosted the low sounds a lot so you can clearly hear the difference right now i disabled the vst plugin so this is how it sounds and now i'm gonna enable the vst plugin and you clearly hear the difference now you also gotta know that the mic is pretty far away from me if you're gonna use a boom arm it's definitely gonna sound very warm and very bassy so this is how it sounds when i disable it and then this is how it sounds when i enable it now i kind of over did it it sounds like i'm on a radio station but you get what you can do with this so you want to play around with all these sliders here until the mic sounds like you want as you see when i increase the highs here this is what it does with my voice the crisp sound is coming to the front and with most microphones it also sounds good if you decrease the middle here a bit it's gonna sound more broadcasty like something like this okay so this sounds pretty good with most microphones this sounds much more warm now again it's too much you can decrease these a bit and then the microphone will sound very very decent so again this is without the plugin this is with the plugin now i over did these effects you want to make it more subtle but you clearly hear what this does it's very useful now something else that's very noticeable with these cheaper microphones and actually also expensive ones just because you're in a room is the background noise the constant sensing sound that you're hearing in this firefight mic right now we can easily get rid of that with a noise suppression filter so you click on the plus icon and then you choose noise suppression you click on ok and you're going to have two choices i think rnn noise is only available when you have a decent nvidia card but the other one is also very good you just click on this and then you got to set the noise suppression level but as you hear right now my voice still sounds very decent and the background noise is completely gone you can only hear my voice and you gotta play around with this level the more you suppress the background noise as i'm doing right now the lower quality your voice will become because it's getting suppressed along with noise if you have a decent nvidia core you can also use rnn noise this is ai based you can't really change the sliders etc and to be honest i still hear a bit of noise on the background maybe it's because it's a kind of cheap nvidia card i'm not sure i'm using this one here and it's much better now even though we added this compressor and the expander that manage how loud or how quiet our voices it's always possible that a clapping sound or something falling or you slamming your desk is pushing the volume to the maximum and the speaking into viewers ears so a total final fail-safe you can put on that is adding another filter the last one we're gonna add and adding a limiter now what this does is it simply completely limits your volume from going above a certain volume what the compressor did is basically making very loud sounds a bit more quiet however if it's very very very loud then making it a bit more quiet is still not going to help so that's where the limiter comes in you can set this at something like -1 decibels and then when you look at the meter it's gonna be impossible to make it peak all the way so i'm just gonna slam my desk and you're gonna see that it's impossible to make it peak as you saw this is the maximum if i move this threshold to -14 for example then when i slam as you see it doesn't go past this here it doesn't go past -14. so you can also put this on other sources like a screen capture for example if a youtube video is very loud you can add a limiter to the source that comes from youtube and then that way you can also limit that there's a lot of possibilities if you're still on the search for a cheap microphone i will link my my comparison video right here i bought seven cheap mics on amazon and i compared them all and one of my next videos is gonna be a wish.com my comparison video i bought very cheap microphones on which i'm comparing them all if you want to see that subscribe to the channel thank you so much for watching and i will see you or i hope i will see you in the next video have a nice day