Speaker 1: Well, hey everybody. My name is Nathaniel Dodds from tutvid.com. Welcome into this Adobe Audition tutorial, where we're going to talk about making your voice, and just generally making your audio sound better, using Adobe Audition. It's pretty simple, it's pretty straightforward, but I think you're really going to find it useful and helpful, and all sorts of other things, if you at all record your voice, or use one of these things, called a microphone. This, by the way, is the Rode Procaster. It's an amazing little microphone. I love it very much. If you do enjoy this tutorial, make sure you subscribe to my channel, so you never miss any other audio or video editing tutorials in the future. Let's jump into Audition now, and check this thing out. For the first time in the history of this channel, starting out a tutorial in Adobe Audition, I've got a little voiceover recording of myself, that we can use to walk through the workflow I currently use to clean up and make my audio sound better, and cleaner. Here, check this out, a little before and after. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. So, I'll open the audio file that I want to work on. I've got a couple of takes here in this audio file, and I happen to know that the first take is not the right one. It's not the one that I want. I'm interested in this audio over here, on the right side of my audio waveform. I'm going to drag a selection over it, while making sure to leave a few seconds of extra time at the beginning. This is so I have a sound floor that I can use for reducing background noise a little bit later. With this chunk of audio selected, I'm going to hit Command or Control T to perform a crop, which will dump all the other audio in here, and allow me to work on the bit that I want to keep. Now, the general process that I almost always follow, and some of these steps are applicable at all times, and some of them, it's just, you'll kind of learn what to do, and when to do it, the more you work with this stuff. But the general process that I almost always follow, is light noise reduction initially, normalize the audio to boost the levels, light noise reduction again, only if needed, then I'll compress the audio, just to flatten out huge peaks, and control the quiet bits a little. Equalize, and then normalize again, and then if need be, after all of that, apply a hard limiter, just to control the overall levels, and produce a finished sounding piece of audio. Now, before we get doing the actual audio editing, something cool that we're going to do, and come back to at the end of this video, will be how to apply this audio transformation in literally seconds. So, that's going to require us creating what's called a favorite. So, before we apply anything to this audio clip, hang with me here, and go favorites, and choose to start recording favorite, and then hit OK to begin the recording. Now, everything you do from here on in Adobe Audition is going to be recorded, so you may need to do a couple takes of this, that's fine. When you feel comfortable going through all these effects, record your own favorite. I'm just telling you now, so if you get through it, you don't have to re-watch the entire tutorial later. I'm going to drag a selection over the very first few seconds, where we aren't speaking into the microphone, but the mic has captured all that nasty, crunchy background noise that we want to get rid of. Then I'm going to go effects, noise reduction, capture noise print, and go effect, select all, just select all my audio, and then go back to effects, noise reduction, and choose the noise reduction process. Now, in here, I like to set noise reduction to about 50% for more of a subtle effect. I absolutely don't want anything extreme, and then I'll set reduce by to something around 10 dBs. I'll also drag the points on the blue line here and there to help pull all the particles together a little bit. We can listen to a preview before and after here. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Now, because there's so little background noise in this audio as it stands, it's going to be really hard to hear a huge difference at this point. But we at least will be able to hear if we're really messing up our own audio with the way this effect fades in and out. The goal here is, don't mess up your audio, but still reduce a little bit of that background noise. You can always reduce the power of this effect by lowering the noise reduction, and reduce numbers if the effect is making your audio sound kind of wacky. Alright, so next we're going to go effects, amplitude, and compression, and choose to normalize this. I'm going to choose to normalize this to negative six decibels. Now, negative three is usually a good place to have your sound levels. Sometimes broadcast TV, generally speaking, dialogue is anywhere from negative six to negative twelve dBs. So negative three is great for like online web stuff where you're kind of, you know, you're very loud, you're definitely not clipping, but you have good oomph in your audio. But it's still, it's not really a problem to have it down at negative six or even eight or ten dB. Just negative three is generally a good place to have your sound levels. Just make sure you don't have some spike that blows out your audio and clips everything. I'm just normalizing this to negative six dB because we still have some processing to do. This is just to boost things up for now. Now here's where we'll check on the quieter areas of some of the audio, and just see if we need more noise reduction. Mine here sounds like it could use a little tiny bit more, so I'm going to add a little bit more using that same exact method that I used before. But again, I want to be very careful that I don't destroy my audio here. I'll try to be careful with this additional noise reduction here. Alright, next. I'll move on to the compression stage. So compression is where we tell the peaks, the louder bits, just to chill out a little bit. Let the whole recording work together a little bit more uniformly. Reduce the loud stuff, and that's going to make the quieter stuff sound like it's boosted a little bit. Everything's going to be sort of flattened out a little. So we'll go effects, amplitude, and compression, and we'll choose the very simple single band compressor. I say that half-jokingly, because it still is a little difficult to understand, but it's not quite as crazy as the multi-band compressor. And in here, we want to target all the audio above the negative 12 decibel mark for this particular clip. You can see out here, using my scale, I can see that if I just have these wayward peaks, and stuff shooting up past negative 12 dB, if I can calm that stuff down while retaining the levels of the quieter stuff, I can really compress the overall range that this audio covers quite a bit. I'm also going to compress using the 4 to 1 ratio. That basically means that any audio above the negative 12 dB mark, anything louder than negative 12 dBs on my scale, it will end up being one-fourth, or a quarter, of its original volume. Now, when we apply this effect, notice how the center core audio remains largely untouched, while those bigger spikes, well, they can push down a little bit. Now, a side note. This also means that if we now go and normalize to negative 3 dBs, much more of that quieter stuff can be boosted, because we don't have a few tall peaks running into the negative 3 dB, and stopping everything else at its lower level from being lifted up. But, we'll do that stuff later. For now, let's add some zest by running a little EQ on our audio. So, go effects, filter and EQ, and choose the parametric equalizer. And here, I'm going to choose the loudness maximizer preset. It sounds super crazy and aggressive, but don't worry. We just want to do it to use the points that are in here. In fact, I like to add a third point. We can just click the number two button here. I'll start playing the audio in the background as I perform changes, just so I can hear in real time what I'm doing. I'll drag the L mark up a little bit to boost some of the deeper tones. And I'll also boost the treble by pushing the H point upward a little bit as well. Be careful that you don't go too high over here, though. You can end up adding this painful to listen to, snapping, crispy, crackling sound, which is especially uncomfortable for those of us that wear headphones. More times than the beginner has even tried. I'll also grab this new point, sort of in the middle, and try to reduce some of the mid-levels a little bit. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Again, this is all going to be touch and feel, depending on your voice, the quality of your recording, maybe the mic you're using, the environment you're in. There's a lot that goes into this. So, just really listen to your audio and figure out what works for you. The basic formula that I like to follow, though, is almost create a little bit of this very flat V shape, where I boost the lows, boost the highs, and reduce the mids just a little bit. The master has failed more times. Alright, so we'll apply the EQ when I like what I've got, and then I'm going to normalize again. So I'm going to go effects, amplitude and compression, normalized. And now I'm going to normalize to negative 3 dB, and this is going to complete what I like to do with my audio. So, after this, remember we recorded that favorite, so we'll go favorites, and choose stop recording favorite. And I'm going to name this, I don't know, my audio processing, or something like that. And then I'm going to go edit keyboard shortcuts, and this is where it gets really cool. And we can run a search for my audio, and it's going to find that favorite that we just created, because it shows up in one of the menus. And I'm going to assign the hotkey, really you can assign anything, I'm just going to throw the hotkey A on it right now. I'll apply all those changes, and then we can use our little history panel down here, to get back to before we applied anything to this audio clip, any of those effects. We can simply select the audio, and then hit the letter A, and watch Audition apply everything to this clip. Easy peasy, just the way I like it. Now, just a quick end note here, if you're dealing with audio that has like extreme peaks, and very quiet valleys, maybe you were talking and then screaming, or something happened that made your audio peak really hardcore in a specific area, that one peak will prevent the first normalizer we ran, from boosting everything quite as much as you would like it to. And in some cases, it can even reduce the overall volume of your audio, depending on just how high that spike of audio went. In cases like that, where all of your audio is maybe one level, and you have one area of extreme peaks, look first at applying some dynamics processing, and limit the audio. Using something like the broadcast delimiter, and maybe drag those first two points down, to wherever works. Kind of where the bulk of the peaks in your audio already are. And commit that change, and this will help bring the levels down to a decibel level where the bulk of your audio peaks are, just as we kind of scripted it. This will essentially trim off that massive peak, and allow you to normalize everything in a way that will actually boost audio levels uniformly. In fact, in a lot of cases, using a limiter before even applying a normalize effect can be very helpful if you have any kind of varying levels in your audio. For the most part, I'm sitting here in studio, in front of the same microphone, in a very controlled environment, where I'm not moving around. So it's not something I'm super duper concerned about. That being said, it might be a good idea for me to think about applying a limiter, or this dynamics processing, which is essentially a limiter, to my audio first. And of course, before I let you go, you can see how this is really trimming the audio way down. So what I'll probably do, because we're limited at negative 12, we probably want to boost ourselves back up to negative 6. So this would be another instance where we would go effects, amplitude and compression, and choose to normalize once again. And this time we'll normalize this bad boy at negative 6 dB, and you'll see it's going to stretch us out again. And now when we preview this, we should be sounding pretty good. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. So it can be a very helpful tool to have in certain situations when you need to have your audio levels on lockdown. So that will about wrap this one up, folks. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and checking this thing out. I really hope you enjoyed it. For using the normalizer, and EQ, and some compression, and all the other stuff that we covered here in Adobe Audition, that's it. Get it? Got it? Good. Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day. Also, buy my course. It helps us do what we do, and this channel is supported by viewers just like you. You can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this channel. See you next time, guys.