Using Your Presonus Studio One Interface: A Step-by-Step Guide

One of the most exciting things about using your Presonus Studio One interface is the software itself, which comes loaded with tons of features and effects to help you shape your sound. You can bounce around in the software and then translate those settings over to the real-time processing in the DSP, which is really cool.

You have three different kinds of EQs available: Standard Passagé, Vintage Passagé, and Passive. I'm a huge fan of the Standard Parametric EQ, which has one, two, or three bands of EQ to work with. This is a basic but powerful tool that allows you to cut through your mix with precision. You can use it to boost or cut specific frequencies, depending on the sound you're trying to achieve. One of the really cool things about this EQ is that you have full control over the frequency width, gain, and type of curve. You can dial in exactly the frequency you want, scrolling through a range or dragging the dial for precise control.

The compressor is another essential tool in Studio One, and I've found it to be incredibly versatile. You have three different kinds of compressors available: Standard Tube, FET, and Passive (although I rarely use the Passive one). The standard compressor has a threshold, attack, release ratio, and gain, allowing you to control the dynamic range of your signal. One of the key features of this compressor is that it allows you to set up "keyless" and "key filter" modes, which can be used to create a de-esser effect or to adjust the compression ratio. The compressor also has a unique feature called the "button" between the two modes, allowing you to switch whether EQ happens before compression or vice versa.

In Normal Processing, you have access to a Limiter, which stops your signal from getting too loud and preventing digital clipping. This is especially useful when working with soft compressors that might not be able to bring your loudest peaks down as much as you'd like. The Limiter ensures that your signal stays within safe limits, preventing distortion or other unwanted effects.

Finally, the Fat Channel offers a range of additional processing options, including Voices (a series of filters and effects that can be used to create unique sounds). This is a great way to add some creativity to your recordings, but it does require some manual experimentation to get the right sound. Once you've finished tweaking your settings, you can save them by clicking "Save" in the Fat Channel section.

One of the most impressive features of Studio One is its Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) mixing capabilities. You can mix multiple sub-mixes together, including your headphone output and any additional audio sources. This allows for a high degree of flexibility and control over your recording setup.

In addition to these advanced features, the Presonus Studio One interface also has an incredible DSP on board. This allows you to apply a range of effects to your signal in real-time, including reverb, delay, and distortion. The ability to work with these effects directly from the interface is incredibly convenient and can save a lot of time.

One area where I do wish the Presonus Studio One interface had some more power is in its preamps. While they're still plenty capable, I think it would be nice if they were a bit more robust and powerful, especially when working with low-output microphones. However, this is a minor complaint, and overall, I've been extremely impressed with the capabilities of the Presonus Studio One interface.

Overall, using your Presonus Studio One interface is an incredibly rewarding experience, thanks to its wealth of features and effects at your fingertips. Whether you're looking to boost your sound or add some creativity to your recordings, this interface has got you covered.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's not often a company that makes products for the actual like higher tier industry in audio or video or what have you makes a solution that also works for live streamers and that is what presonus have done with their universal control software for their revelator line of products and admittedly when i first reviewed the first audio interface in this line that i tested which was the i o 24 last year i wasn't as big of a fan i saw the potential of how it could be adapted and used for streaming but i didn't think it was actually applied in the right direction or however you want to see it that way they have updated the software they have updated the capabilities along with their new interface the io44 which is what we're using both for my microphone and for showing this off in this video and i am very stoked at the fact that they're listening and the fact that they can show how a high you know high quality audio interface can be used for both workflows let's jump in in today's tutorial i'm eposvox the stream professor and i show you how to get the most out of your streaming tech and general computer use and all that and today we're just doing the tutorial i promised a few months ago for the universal control software for the presonus revelator line of products i just reviewed their usb dynamic microphone they have usb condenser microphone and now they have a few different audio interfaces that are absolutely great for live streamers and they offer some of the same features that the elgato wave the go xlr the beacon mix and mix create offer in terms of audio channel routing and all of that and it has a built-in dsp in both the interfaces and the usb mics so you can make your voice sound super good to access the software that you're seeing here you go to your system tray and my webcam is blocking it naturally this is why i should not have set up the scene this way but go to your system tray and you're going to have the universal control software once you install it for your audio interface it pops up this lets you change the sample rate the block size for aco and things like that but it will list any revelator devices you have connected and as i showed in my dynamic usb review it'll show multiple ones but you just click on it it opens you here there is a lot to take in with the software it looks fairly simple and overall i think it's laid out fairly intuitively but there's a lot to take in so let's take it one step at a time first and foremost the main ui here at the top will be your audio processing settings for any given input at the bottom is your mixer and your bus interfaces in terms of all of your different routing there's a lot of routing capabilities we're going to talk about it let's just start with the basic i have hooked up a microphone we've connected it here and we have it connected by the way for this recording i have both the microphone line as well as the two virtual sub mixes here and hopefully my editor and i will remember to make sure that we indicate when we are switching between them for the purposes of those topics later in the video but i have connected a microphone to the xlr port this is the earthworks ethos incredible microphone and so we have it activated in the main microphone channel here if you're using the i o 24 you'll actually have two different microphones this one only has one xlr port but then you do have a headset mic input as well that you can access separately and you can see here this actually has separate audio settings but for now we're focusing on our first input you set your gain with this dial over here on the left we're sitting pretty at about 25 decibels of gain you can also turn up reverb reverb is a whole separate sin channel that you can mix to your different mixes if you want to get nice and echoey here we will switch to stream mix a for this i will turn up the reverb and we'll just crank it up reverb yeah theoretically that should have been in the stream mix so you control the reverb send on the mic itself because you can change it per source and then you can just adjust how much it goes to each individual mix so for example my headphone mix has no reverb the stream mix has some the second stream x has none we'll cover that more in detail later but you got gain you got reverb then of course you have 48 volts of phantom power i'm using a condenser microphone it's still a broadcast microphone but it is a condenser it requires 48 volts of phantom power to power if you're using a dynamic microphone it does not need it however again i stated this in my i o 24 review the preamps in the revelator products are decent but for high gain microphones like the re20 and the sm7b they do struggle a bit to power them cleanly and i would recommend a microphone activator such as the code of stealth the fed head the cloud lifter the soyu launcher any of those options and those will take phantom power to then apply the additional gain to your microphone but we have you know your loudness so that you can see if you get too loud loud it gives you a cliffness indicator clippiness clip-ness is not a word the hell am i smoking next to your loudness and your weird clippiness i guess indicator as i called it you have the noise gate attenuation so you can see when it's cutting out background noise based on your threshold of talking gets louder when you get quieter that's the idea i will say again game we're gonna have a whole separate video dedicated like getting the perfect audio on stream in terms of the software side soon uh but more or less you know you want your average peaks here to peak around like minus six to minus 10 which is kind of what we're aiming at here and then now we have plenty of head room for those loud peaks as i was clearly just doing then you have mute and solo so you can have an individual device be the only device going to a specific mix this is more meant to be kind of like a temporary toggle because otherwise you can just turn down the faders it's a standard mixer feature and of course you have the mute which does not mute if you access the individual audio device it mutes it to the mixes and i will show you that actually right now so we can show this a little better so the way this interface works is much like a multi-input mixer or something like the go xlr in that you can access each individual device as its own audio device in windows or in your streaming software but then it provides the mixes for you that you can access separately this is more convenient because in most cases you're just going to be sending a final mix either to your streaming software or to zoom teams skype discord whatever but you have the ability to access both and so things like the level fader and the mute button and the solo button only apply to the mixes themselves not to the actual if you just hook the actual microphone device so for example if we go in here to our obs settings and go to audio devices under microphone i can actually activate the mic instrument device itself which is what you're hearing now but i can also choose the stream mix a and the stream mix b that i can choose from now the main mix you cannot choose from uh because it is just meant to be for your headphones really but you can choose the stream xa or the stream xb as separate devices as well as the line in input so you can manage those separately as a fourth submix effectively in your streaming software if you'd like because now i can sit here okay i have the line in and the mic added separately they are down here in the audio devices and i can drag and manage their levels separately on their own now i will say the headset mic and the in xlr mic come in as left and right channels on the audio interface which is how most dual input audio interfaces work it's really frustrating if you are just using one you can down mix the mono with this mono button here in obs advanced audio settings and you'll be fine if you're using aco or the acl plug-in for obs studio or your daw or whatever then you can access them individually but streaming software for windows these interfaces never set up mono devices i don't know why but that's just a caveat you're dealing with here so that is what your main microphone channel on the mixer section itself looks like then you have the exact same setup for the headset mic you have the 3.5 millimeter headset mic input you don't get phantom power for it obviously but you get gain reverb and your levels as well as mute and solo and then you have the line input so this io 44 differs from the i o 24 in that it has a dedicated 3.5 mil line in jack which they advertise is being used for say dj workflows where you have a separate mix coming in you could use it for your game consoles if you have an hdmi to 3.5 millimeter converter or your monitor has a headphone or line output which is fairly common and so you can get a whole separate stereo source in here which again i just showed you can add to obs and you can manage just levels here as well as trim which is basically just like kind of a an added gain boost or pad because this is a level level differs from gain we can talk about this in a separate audio fundamentals thing but this is basically gain or padding on the input itself uh to affect how it in you know literally takes in the signal versus the level that it goes to the mix and then you can apply reverb to that as well which is pretty cool you can also apply the fat channel to it which is really magical we'll cover that in a moment and then you have your separate faders for both the playback device this is a separate device that you can actually assign audio to in windows that just shows up as your headphones so this will go to either mix and that's really cool so you technically have three virtual audio devices because you can send audio to the playback left and right or you can send to the virtual output b or virtual output a which are these virtual devices so much like the go xlr the uh the beacon mix create the elgato wave this device creates three virtual devices that you can route audio to such as separating game sound from voice chat game sound from music etc you can route audio separately to these virtual devices they'll be all mixed separately to your headphones your stream output and to that third sub mix that you can use for whatever you like separate mixes for streaming and recording several mixes for voice chat and stream you know you have a lot of potential here there is a lot of power available through these three different submixes plus the ability to make your own sub mixes in obs plus the three different audio devices it is technically less devices or fewer devices than the elgato wave or the beacon or the go xlr but i think it's enough for most people most people do not use all the devices that those other tools give you so you can manage muting volume levels and soloing for each of these individual virtual devices right here which is really lovely then of course as i mentioned you can apply reverb to either three of your input devices individually with based on the gain and adjust how much of that reverb and the size of it and all of that goes to individual mixes so i'm going to turn that back off for this mix my bad so that's the mixing section in terms of the core like what you would normally see on the mixer and then you have your headphone mix section over here on the right and this allows you to control what you actually hear so you have a master fader for each individual mix and this will actually control what goes out to your stream obviously you can control that again in your streaming software but you got you can mute the entire mix you can control the fader for the entire mix you can also uh turn the individual mixes into mono if you like for whatever reason you have that capability and then you can also link either of these stream mixes to your main mix so whichever mix you are monitoring when you click this link symbol those levels are going to be adjusted to how you hear them in your primary mix which is useful if you just want to make sure that you are hearing you know that you are hearing everything at the same level you can also adjust which mix you're actually listening to so the toggle that the beacon mic stuff gives you you can choose which mix actually goes to your headphones so you can always keep an eye on what you need to hear from that which is really powerful you also have additional adjustment for the main out which is the two 1 4 inch jacks on either audio interface which can run to your speakers your studio monitors a separate mixer whatever you can adjust the output levels for that you can adjust your headphone levels here and you can adjust the blend between your like real-time monitoring and your actual mix levels and things like that with this dial as well which is pretty neat so before we get to the mic fat channel and all the microphone processing and all of that i want to demo the sub mixing workflow for you here as mentioned previously i have both the microphone itself as well as the tube submixes added to obs and so we are going to start assigning sounds to the different submixes so you can hear how this sounds individually so i'm going to set my windows playback to the playback device that i showed you the first virtual audio device and i'm going to start playing a video i'm going to start playing this video about this modular synth that i am currently borrowing that is going to the playback device so for stream mix a if i come back here to our screen capture for stream mix a i'm going to turn that all the way up and actually up a little bit so that my audience can hear it but i want a separate recording that is maybe trying to be safer for youtube's algorithms or something like that where it's gonna stay muted so that the vod doesn't have it or if i'm recording game highlights and i just happen to you know be playing a video or something i don't need that audio messing it up so i'm gonna leave that muted for stream mix a leave it up for stream xb secondarily i'm gonna start playing music so i'm gonna open up vlc media player i'm gonna open up our backing track music folder we're gonna play the new synth wave album which is coming out in june i'm gonna set the audio device to virtual output a and that is just going to be rocking some music to virtual a so for my headphones i'm going to turn the music pretty far down like i want to hear the video but uh the music i don't need to hear i need to focus on my game a little bit i just want to know that it's there for stream xa which is going to my live stream i want music to be there but i don't want it to be overpowering so we're going to set it to like -30 maybe minus 32. that should be okay for stream xb which is my recording one again maybe just using for game highlights or something again i want the music and the video muted i don't want any audio except maybe my voice and the game going to that and then i can fire up a game i don't want to launch a game while recording all this stuff so i'm just kind of going to simulate it with a video capture of a game so i have a video pulled up i'm going to go to the windows volume mixer and assign my media player to the virtual output b and then i'm going to play that video which may not have any sound because this is one not the screen capture i was looking for let's do that one all right and now we're going to go back to universal control you can see here virtual b has some audio again for that second recording sub mix i do not want for the stream mix i do want them to hear it but i want it again not be super overbearing so minus 11. and then for my main headphone mix i do want to be able to hear it a little bit so that i can you know react to it in chat because that's going to be my game actually if that's my game then yeah i want that all the way up maybe turn play back a little far down so now we got to go back to chrome because that video stopped playing that back all right so now we have a headphone sub mix where i hear things differently then the stream hears them and then i have a separate recording mix where pretty much everything except me and the game which we're going to turn up here actually we want the game at like what minus 24 that's probably good so now we have a recording submix a streaming submix and a headphone sub mix separate from each other and now my editor can switch between just my microphone and then we have stream mix b which is just me and the game boop video pretty cool again this is the functionality everyone wants for you know this is why the go xlr was well part of why the go xlr was so competitive part of it was also the microphone processing we're gonna cover in a minute and it was why you know the beacon stuff in the elgato wave is so cool so it has all of this this is really cool finally let's talk about processing your microphone because the presonus revelator products has a dsp in built-in this is a digital signal processor it's hardware processing for your audio be it the usb microphones or the audio interfaces both categories have dsps inside that process your microphone and allow you to do good processing effects and things like that without using up cpu cycles or anything like that and that's what we're going to dive into last year so any input device not the output devices or just the input devices give you access to their fat channel and their fat channel is their post-processing suite i'm still not a huge fan of the ui i don't like this big obnoxious dial for the preset selector you can click this name and do a drop down though this is how you save presets that's a little weird and then you have this hotkey effect which is just supposed to do something crazy and then it saves a couple of the presets on the buttons here like i'm still not a fan of the ui i think it's weirdly obtuse and confusing but i can walk you through the basics because it's really powerful so again ignore the stuff on the left just focus over here on the right so again these are your presets you'll choose between these in case you have different microphones or different modes you want it to sound or maybe different processing for it up close versus further away whatever and then you have your fat channel now if you are if you want to be super basic with it you can just adjust these buttons so you got a high pass filter you can choose uh what frequency it drops off at you got a noise gate you can choose the aggressiveness of it you can choose a compressor an eq limiter this is not very detailed but if you want to just you know i want a moderate limiter i want some of these eq presets whatever you have that available to you which is pretty cool including a de-esser mode for the compressor which is nice what if you want to get deeper though we can do that first and foremost again they do come with presets so the i o 44 specifically has a broadcast preset this is the broadcast preset actually i'm going to turn the gate down the noise gates on these presets always break for some reason for me so this is the broadcast preset this is the vocal preset for like singing vocals i guess this is the acoustic guitar preset which has no relevance to the voice actually most of these this don't a robot and this is what i built for my earthworks microphones it's labeled icon pro but i tweaked it for this one and again you'll see some of those buttons on the left changed based on what was already selected i don't it's supposed to be like a quick access area for the button like the interface and the microphones have preset buttons on them i i still think they need a lot of work on that but you have all those settings if you want to dive in this little like eq or like faders looking button is how you dive into the fat channel it's also up here at the top right as well click that and now you have a whole suite of processing available to you so we're going to start left to right because that's literally how the chain operates in terms of what step applies where so first and foremost high pass filter this rolls off the low end to keep from being super boomy i don't know why it's set to 40 hertz i usually set it to about 60 hertz we'll set it there the second module is your noise gate you can set up a key lesson to try to listen for your noise levels you can enable or disable an expander which is basically going to not only gate sounds below a certain level but then kind of push down sounds above that level to make it a little bit more natural so like a noise gate is great for cutting out a consistent background like ambient tone like a hiss and ac whatever and expander is going to help some of those more random you know bumps and stuff they have there you got your threshold attack release and your key filter to listen for specific frequencies i don't use key filter or keyless and a whole lot so i don't have a ton of experience i will confess each one of these modules by the way you can turn off or turn on at a moment's notice so if you don't want to use one entirely or you want to test see how things sound without it you can do this by the way someone mentioned in the comment section of my review of the dynamic microphone you can actually set up all of this in presonus studio one daw their audio software it has the exact same fat channel so you can access those settings if you turn all this off in the universal control software get it you know it's a lot easier to eq and tweak your sound of your voice when you're not listening to it bouncing around in your head so you can do all that in their software and then translate the settings over to the real-time software in the dsp which is really cool and i get the feeling you can probably export a preset to then import into the universal control software but i haven't messed with that yet all right next up is eq you have three different kinds of eqs available standard passage and vintage uh passage passive i say that every time i'm a huge fan of the standard one this is a basic uh parametric eq you have one two three four bands of eq to work with which is not a ton but it's fine cut the mids boost the highs tweak your lows to cut out the muds it muds yeah muddiness if you're using a super bright microphone you actually might want to turn the highs down a little bit here you know you got this you got full control over hue width the gain up to minus 12 and plus 12 db and then the specific you can dial in the exact frequency that you want you can either scroll type in or drag which is really great to interact with the dials you have the compressor again you got three different kinds you got standard tube and fet again i don't mess with the other stuff a whole lot it's still on my list to learn and tweak with so i just use the standard one you've got your threshold i recommend setting a higher threshold when possible to keep some of your dynamic range and make it more just general nice and pleasing attack release ratio and gain and again you can set up keyless and key filter to turn it into a de-esser but it seems like it's not super easy to turn it into both a de-esser and a standard compressor so you have that now you do have this button between these two to actually swap whether compression happens before eq or whether eq happens before compression i tend to prefer these days to have eq happening after compression because compression makes such a big difference on your sound but you can try it either way and whichever you like best you can work with or you can tweak your eq underneath the compression like color grading under a lut or something you have that available too lastly in the normal processing you have the limiter and this basically just stops anything after a certain point so obviously the compressor is bringing your loudest parts down and ideally you're not getting any louder after a certain point but you know if you have a bunch of peaks and you're using a softer compressor like i do the limiter just keeps you from digitally clipping at all which is really nice you do have a final option here in the fat channel which is voices which is just a series of filters that allow you to do a bunch of different effects uh detuner doubling vocoding ring modulating some basic filters and delays i'm not going to mess with that here but you can have a lot of fun with that if you want to do some special effects you just have to manually kind of turn them on and back off and then once you're done with your settings you come down here to the save button you give it a name bloop store it it did not go anywhere we clicked store i don't know where it went oh you gotta click one of them again i'm not a huge fan of this ui but you gotta click one of the spots and click store and now it'll be in the drop down or in the dial i just don't touch the dial just use the drop down but you get the idea between all the virtual audio cable mixing the multiple sub mixes which are technically three if you count your headphone output plus the ability to build your own sub mix in your streaming software and the incredible dsp on board to give you lots of effects to control the sound of your voice the presonus stuff is really cool i've been a huge fan i still got a i haven't shot my review of the i o 44 at this point in time i do wish the preamps were a little beefier a little chunkier in terms of powering the the low output uh dynamic mics but that's okay uh and yeah i promised this tutorial a few months back and just was waiting on them to update the software to really kind of show off the potential how i think it should be and i think they've gotten most the way there i think there's still some work to be done but i appreciate what they're doing and i wanted to show you how to use it because a lot of you all on our discord server have been hopping on the interfaces and the mics and i'm super stoked to see it hope you enjoyed this video if you did and found it helpful uh check out this other video on my review of presonus's revelator i o 24 or of their usb dynamic microphone and links everything will be in the description below remember be kind rewindit's not often a company that makes products for the actual like higher tier industry in audio or video or what have you makes a solution that also works for live streamers and that is what presonus have done with their universal control software for their revelator line of products and admittedly when i first reviewed the first audio interface in this line that i tested which was the i o 24 last year i wasn't as big of a fan i saw the potential of how it could be adapted and used for streaming but i didn't think it was actually applied in the right direction or however you want to see it that way they have updated the software they have updated the capabilities along with their new interface the io44 which is what we're using both for my microphone and for showing this off in this video and i am very stoked at the fact that they're listening and the fact that they can show how a high you know high quality audio interface can be used for both workflows let's jump in in today's tutorial i'm eposvox the stream professor and i show you how to get the most out of your streaming tech and general computer use and all that and today we're just doing the tutorial i promised a few months ago for the universal control software for the presonus revelator line of products i just reviewed their usb dynamic microphone they have usb condenser microphone and now they have a few different audio interfaces that are absolutely great for live streamers and they offer some of the same features that the elgato wave the go xlr the beacon mix and mix create offer in terms of audio channel routing and all of that and it has a built-in dsp in both the interfaces and the usb mics so you can make your voice sound super good to access the software that you're seeing here you go to your system tray and my webcam is blocking it naturally this is why i should not have set up the scene this way but go to your system tray and you're going to have the universal control software once you install it for your audio interface it pops up this lets you change the sample rate the block size for aco and things like that but it will list any revelator devices you have connected and as i showed in my dynamic usb review it'll show multiple ones but you just click on it it opens you here there is a lot to take in with the software it looks fairly simple and overall i think it's laid out fairly intuitively but there's a lot to take in so let's take it one step at a time first and foremost the main ui here at the top will be your audio processing settings for any given input at the bottom is your mixer and your bus interfaces in terms of all of your different routing there's a lot of routing capabilities we're going to talk about it let's just start with the basic i have hooked up a microphone we've connected it here and we have it connected by the way for this recording i have both the microphone line as well as the two virtual sub mixes here and hopefully my editor and i will remember to make sure that we indicate when we are switching between them for the purposes of those topics later in the video but i have connected a microphone to the xlr port this is the earthworks ethos incredible microphone and so we have it activated in the main microphone channel here if you're using the i o 24 you'll actually have two different microphones this one only has one xlr port but then you do have a headset mic input as well that you can access separately and you can see here this actually has separate audio settings but for now we're focusing on our first input you set your gain with this dial over here on the left we're sitting pretty at about 25 decibels of gain you can also turn up reverb reverb is a whole separate sin channel that you can mix to your different mixes if you want to get nice and echoey here we will switch to stream mix a for this i will turn up the reverb and we'll just crank it up reverb yeah theoretically that should have been in the stream mix so you control the reverb send on the mic itself because you can change it per source and then you can just adjust how much it goes to each individual mix so for example my headphone mix has no reverb the stream mix has some the second stream x has none we'll cover that more in detail later but you got gain you got reverb then of course you have 48 volts of phantom power i'm using a condenser microphone it's still a broadcast microphone but it is a condenser it requires 48 volts of phantom power to power if you're using a dynamic microphone it does not need it however again i stated this in my i o 24 review the preamps in the revelator products are decent but for high gain microphones like the re20 and the sm7b they do struggle a bit to power them cleanly and i would recommend a microphone activator such as the code of stealth the fed head the cloud lifter the soyu launcher any of those options and those will take phantom power to then apply the additional gain to your microphone but we have you know your loudness so that you can see if you get too loud loud it gives you a cliffness indicator clippiness clip-ness is not a word the hell am i smoking next to your loudness and your weird clippiness i guess indicator as i called it you have the noise gate attenuation so you can see when it's cutting out background noise based on your threshold of talking gets louder when you get quieter that's the idea i will say again game we're gonna have a whole separate video dedicated like getting the perfect audio on stream in terms of the software side soon uh but more or less you know you want your average peaks here to peak around like minus six to minus 10 which is kind of what we're aiming at here and then now we have plenty of head room for those loud peaks as i was clearly just doing then you have mute and solo so you can have an individual device be the only device going to a specific mix this is more meant to be kind of like a temporary toggle because otherwise you can just turn down the faders it's a standard mixer feature and of course you have the mute which does not mute if you access the individual audio device it mutes it to the mixes and i will show you that actually right now so we can show this a little better so the way this interface works is much like a multi-input mixer or something like the go xlr in that you can access each individual device as its own audio device in windows or in your streaming software but then it provides the mixes for you that you can access separately this is more convenient because in most cases you're just going to be sending a final mix either to your streaming software or to zoom teams skype discord whatever but you have the ability to access both and so things like the level fader and the mute button and the solo button only apply to the mixes themselves not to the actual if you just hook the actual microphone device so for example if we go in here to our obs settings and go to audio devices under microphone i can actually activate the mic instrument device itself which is what you're hearing now but i can also choose the stream mix a and the stream mix b that i can choose from now the main mix you cannot choose from uh because it is just meant to be for your headphones really but you can choose the stream xa or the stream xb as separate devices as well as the line in input so you can manage those separately as a fourth submix effectively in your streaming software if you'd like because now i can sit here okay i have the line in and the mic added separately they are down here in the audio devices and i can drag and manage their levels separately on their own now i will say the headset mic and the in xlr mic come in as left and right channels on the audio interface which is how most dual input audio interfaces work it's really frustrating if you are just using one you can down mix the mono with this mono button here in obs advanced audio settings and you'll be fine if you're using aco or the acl plug-in for obs studio or your daw or whatever then you can access them individually but streaming software for windows these interfaces never set up mono devices i don't know why but that's just a caveat you're dealing with here so that is what your main microphone channel on the mixer section itself looks like then you have the exact same setup for the headset mic you have the 3.5 millimeter headset mic input you don't get phantom power for it obviously but you get gain reverb and your levels as well as mute and solo and then you have the line input so this io 44 differs from the i o 24 in that it has a dedicated 3.5 mil line in jack which they advertise is being used for say dj workflows where you have a separate mix coming in you could use it for your game consoles if you have an hdmi to 3.5 millimeter converter or your monitor has a headphone or line output which is fairly common and so you can get a whole separate stereo source in here which again i just showed you can add to obs and you can manage just levels here as well as trim which is basically just like kind of a an added gain boost or pad because this is a level level differs from gain we can talk about this in a separate audio fundamentals thing but this is basically gain or padding on the input itself uh to affect how it in you know literally takes in the signal versus the level that it goes to the mix and then you can apply reverb to that as well which is pretty cool you can also apply the fat channel to it which is really magical we'll cover that in a moment and then you have your separate faders for both the playback device this is a separate device that you can actually assign audio to in windows that just shows up as your headphones so this will go to either mix and that's really cool so you technically have three virtual audio devices because you can send audio to the playback left and right or you can send to the virtual output b or virtual output a which are these virtual devices so much like the go xlr the uh the beacon mix create the elgato wave this device creates three virtual devices that you can route audio to such as separating game sound from voice chat game sound from music etc you can route audio separately to these virtual devices they'll be all mixed separately to your headphones your stream output and to that third sub mix that you can use for whatever you like separate mixes for streaming and recording several mixes for voice chat and stream you know you have a lot of potential here there is a lot of power available through these three different submixes plus the ability to make your own sub mixes in obs plus the three different audio devices it is technically less devices or fewer devices than the elgato wave or the beacon or the go xlr but i think it's enough for most people most people do not use all the devices that those other tools give you so you can manage muting volume levels and soloing for each of these individual virtual devices right here which is really lovely then of course as i mentioned you can apply reverb to either three of your input devices individually with based on the gain and adjust how much of that reverb and the size of it and all of that goes to individual mixes so i'm going to turn that back off for this mix my bad so that's the mixing section in terms of the core like what you would normally see on the mixer and then you have your headphone mix section over here on the right and this allows you to control what you actually hear so you have a master fader for each individual mix and this will actually control what goes out to your stream obviously you can control that again in your streaming software but you got you can mute the entire mix you can control the fader for the entire mix you can also uh turn the individual mixes into mono if you like for whatever reason you have that capability and then you can also link either of these stream mixes to your main mix so whichever mix you are monitoring when you click this link symbol those levels are going to be adjusted to how you hear them in your primary mix which is useful if you just want to make sure that you are hearing you know that you are hearing everything at the same level you can also adjust which mix you're actually listening to so the toggle that the beacon mic stuff gives you you can choose which mix actually goes to your headphones so you can always keep an eye on what you need to hear from that which is really powerful you also have additional adjustment for the main out which is the two 1 4 inch jacks on either audio interface which can run to your speakers your studio monitors a separate mixer whatever you can adjust the output levels for that you can adjust your headphone levels here and you can adjust the blend between your like real-time monitoring and your actual mix levels and things like that with this dial as well which is pretty neat so before we get to the mic fat channel and all the microphone processing and all of that i want to demo the sub mixing workflow for you here as mentioned previously i have both the microphone itself as well as the tube submixes added to obs and so we are going to start assigning sounds to the different submixes so you can hear how this sounds individually so i'm going to set my windows playback to the playback device that i showed you the first virtual audio device and i'm going to start playing a video i'm going to start playing this video about this modular synth that i am currently borrowing that is going to the playback device so for stream mix a if i come back here to our screen capture for stream mix a i'm going to turn that all the way up and actually up a little bit so that my audience can hear it but i want a separate recording that is maybe trying to be safer for youtube's algorithms or something like that where it's gonna stay muted so that the vod doesn't have it or if i'm recording game highlights and i just happen to you know be playing a video or something i don't need that audio messing it up so i'm gonna leave that muted for stream mix a leave it up for stream xb secondarily i'm gonna start playing music so i'm gonna open up vlc media player i'm gonna open up our backing track music folder we're gonna play the new synth wave album which is coming out in june i'm gonna set the audio device to virtual output a and that is just going to be rocking some music to virtual a so for my headphones i'm going to turn the music pretty far down like i want to hear the video but uh the music i don't need to hear i need to focus on my game a little bit i just want to know that it's there for stream xa which is going to my live stream i want music to be there but i don't want it to be overpowering so we're going to set it to like -30 maybe minus 32. that should be okay for stream xb which is my recording one again maybe just using for game highlights or something again i want the music and the video muted i don't want any audio except maybe my voice and the game going to that and then i can fire up a game i don't want to launch a game while recording all this stuff so i'm just kind of going to simulate it with a video capture of a game so i have a video pulled up i'm going to go to the windows volume mixer and assign my media player to the virtual output b and then i'm going to play that video which may not have any sound because this is one not the screen capture i was looking for let's do that one all right and now we're going to go back to universal control you can see here virtual b has some audio again for that second recording sub mix i do not want for the stream mix i do want them to hear it but i want it again not be super overbearing so minus 11. and then for my main headphone mix i do want to be able to hear it a little bit so that i can you know react to it in chat because that's going to be my game actually if that's my game then yeah i want that all the way up maybe turn play back a little far down so now we got to go back to chrome because that video stopped playing that back all right so now we have a headphone sub mix where i hear things differently then the stream hears them and then i have a separate recording mix where pretty much everything except me and the game which we're going to turn up here actually we want the game at like what minus 24 that's probably good so now we have a recording submix a streaming submix and a headphone sub mix separate from each other and now my editor can switch between just my microphone and then we have stream mix b which is just me and the game boop video pretty cool again this is the functionality everyone wants for you know this is why the go xlr was well part of why the go xlr was so competitive part of it was also the microphone processing we're gonna cover in a minute and it was why you know the beacon stuff in the elgato wave is so cool so it has all of this this is really cool finally let's talk about processing your microphone because the presonus revelator products has a dsp in built-in this is a digital signal processor it's hardware processing for your audio be it the usb microphones or the audio interfaces both categories have dsps inside that process your microphone and allow you to do good processing effects and things like that without using up cpu cycles or anything like that and that's what we're going to dive into last year so any input device not the output devices or just the input devices give you access to their fat channel and their fat channel is their post-processing suite i'm still not a huge fan of the ui i don't like this big obnoxious dial for the preset selector you can click this name and do a drop down though this is how you save presets that's a little weird and then you have this hotkey effect which is just supposed to do something crazy and then it saves a couple of the presets on the buttons here like i'm still not a fan of the ui i think it's weirdly obtuse and confusing but i can walk you through the basics because it's really powerful so again ignore the stuff on the left just focus over here on the right so again these are your presets you'll choose between these in case you have different microphones or different modes you want it to sound or maybe different processing for it up close versus further away whatever and then you have your fat channel now if you are if you want to be super basic with it you can just adjust these buttons so you got a high pass filter you can choose uh what frequency it drops off at you got a noise gate you can choose the aggressiveness of it you can choose a compressor an eq limiter this is not very detailed but if you want to just you know i want a moderate limiter i want some of these eq presets whatever you have that available to you which is pretty cool including a de-esser mode for the compressor which is nice what if you want to get deeper though we can do that first and foremost again they do come with presets so the i o 44 specifically has a broadcast preset this is the broadcast preset actually i'm going to turn the gate down the noise gates on these presets always break for some reason for me so this is the broadcast preset this is the vocal preset for like singing vocals i guess this is the acoustic guitar preset which has no relevance to the voice actually most of these this don't a robot and this is what i built for my earthworks microphones it's labeled icon pro but i tweaked it for this one and again you'll see some of those buttons on the left changed based on what was already selected i don't it's supposed to be like a quick access area for the button like the interface and the microphones have preset buttons on them i i still think they need a lot of work on that but you have all those settings if you want to dive in this little like eq or like faders looking button is how you dive into the fat channel it's also up here at the top right as well click that and now you have a whole suite of processing available to you so we're going to start left to right because that's literally how the chain operates in terms of what step applies where so first and foremost high pass filter this rolls off the low end to keep from being super boomy i don't know why it's set to 40 hertz i usually set it to about 60 hertz we'll set it there the second module is your noise gate you can set up a key lesson to try to listen for your noise levels you can enable or disable an expander which is basically going to not only gate sounds below a certain level but then kind of push down sounds above that level to make it a little bit more natural so like a noise gate is great for cutting out a consistent background like ambient tone like a hiss and ac whatever and expander is going to help some of those more random you know bumps and stuff they have there you got your threshold attack release and your key filter to listen for specific frequencies i don't use key filter or keyless and a whole lot so i don't have a ton of experience i will confess each one of these modules by the way you can turn off or turn on at a moment's notice so if you don't want to use one entirely or you want to test see how things sound without it you can do this by the way someone mentioned in the comment section of my review of the dynamic microphone you can actually set up all of this in presonus studio one daw their audio software it has the exact same fat channel so you can access those settings if you turn all this off in the universal control software get it you know it's a lot easier to eq and tweak your sound of your voice when you're not listening to it bouncing around in your head so you can do all that in their software and then translate the settings over to the real-time software in the dsp which is really cool and i get the feeling you can probably export a preset to then import into the universal control software but i haven't messed with that yet all right next up is eq you have three different kinds of eqs available standard passage and vintage uh passage passive i say that every time i'm a huge fan of the standard one this is a basic uh parametric eq you have one two three four bands of eq to work with which is not a ton but it's fine cut the mids boost the highs tweak your lows to cut out the muds it muds yeah muddiness if you're using a super bright microphone you actually might want to turn the highs down a little bit here you know you got this you got full control over hue width the gain up to minus 12 and plus 12 db and then the specific you can dial in the exact frequency that you want you can either scroll type in or drag which is really great to interact with the dials you have the compressor again you got three different kinds you got standard tube and fet again i don't mess with the other stuff a whole lot it's still on my list to learn and tweak with so i just use the standard one you've got your threshold i recommend setting a higher threshold when possible to keep some of your dynamic range and make it more just general nice and pleasing attack release ratio and gain and again you can set up keyless and key filter to turn it into a de-esser but it seems like it's not super easy to turn it into both a de-esser and a standard compressor so you have that now you do have this button between these two to actually swap whether compression happens before eq or whether eq happens before compression i tend to prefer these days to have eq happening after compression because compression makes such a big difference on your sound but you can try it either way and whichever you like best you can work with or you can tweak your eq underneath the compression like color grading under a lut or something you have that available too lastly in the normal processing you have the limiter and this basically just stops anything after a certain point so obviously the compressor is bringing your loudest parts down and ideally you're not getting any louder after a certain point but you know if you have a bunch of peaks and you're using a softer compressor like i do the limiter just keeps you from digitally clipping at all which is really nice you do have a final option here in the fat channel which is voices which is just a series of filters that allow you to do a bunch of different effects uh detuner doubling vocoding ring modulating some basic filters and delays i'm not going to mess with that here but you can have a lot of fun with that if you want to do some special effects you just have to manually kind of turn them on and back off and then once you're done with your settings you come down here to the save button you give it a name bloop store it it did not go anywhere we clicked store i don't know where it went oh you gotta click one of them again i'm not a huge fan of this ui but you gotta click one of the spots and click store and now it'll be in the drop down or in the dial i just don't touch the dial just use the drop down but you get the idea between all the virtual audio cable mixing the multiple sub mixes which are technically three if you count your headphone output plus the ability to build your own sub mix in your streaming software and the incredible dsp on board to give you lots of effects to control the sound of your voice the presonus stuff is really cool i've been a huge fan i still got a i haven't shot my review of the i o 44 at this point in time i do wish the preamps were a little beefier a little chunkier in terms of powering the the low output uh dynamic mics but that's okay uh and yeah i promised this tutorial a few months back and just was waiting on them to update the software to really kind of show off the potential how i think it should be and i think they've gotten most the way there i think there's still some work to be done but i appreciate what they're doing and i wanted to show you how to use it because a lot of you all on our discord server have been hopping on the interfaces and the mics and i'm super stoked to see it hope you enjoyed this video if you did and found it helpful uh check out this other video on my review of presonus's revelator i o 24 or of their usb dynamic microphone and links everything will be in the description below remember be kind rewind\n"