Speaker 1: I'm just blown away by what this tiny little device can do. Hey, Brian Miller here, and welcome to Audio for Content Creators, where we help you sound better and level up for all your content creation needs. And this video is all about the Tascam DR-05X portable audio recorder. How to set it up for content creation. This is gonna be a very short, very focused video. I did this exact video about three years ago for the original DR-05 portable audio recorder. That video has become one of the primary sources of kind of quick start tutorials for this particular unit. And the DR-05X is basically the exact same unit, except it can also be used as an audio interface, which we'll talk about in just a little bit. If you just got this thing, you wanna use it, but you have no idea how to use it for content creation, for podcasting, for narration, for voiceover, for YouTube videos, then this video is for you. It should be said that 100% of the audio you're hearing in this video is being recorded with the original DR-05, which has a, I've got a boom microphone just up above my head. I'm using the Movo VXR10 Pro, which is a budget on-camera shotgun mic, the kind of microphone you might be using for content creation. And it's plugged directly into the original DR-05, as you can see, which is strapped to that boom pole. If you wanna know how to set up a boom setup like this to get nice, warm, crisp, clear audio, then just go to this video here. I did a tutorial showing you exactly how to do that. I've opened this up, but I have not actually turned it on yet. So this is exactly what it would look like if you were going to turn it on for the first time and set it up for content creation. Press and hold the home button, which is also the power key, and you'll get a language option here. The play button is your enter button. So I'll hit play. And now we're looking at the home screen. You'll see menu, quick, mark, and PB, cunt. Don't worry about most of these. We're only gonna use the menu right now. Hit the menu button. I'm gonna go into record settings using the play button. The first thing I'm going to do is hit the over button so we can choose different options and change this from wave 16 to wave 24 bit. Wave 24 bit is what you want to record in always for the highest quality. Wave is to MP3 as raw files are to JPEGs. Wave include a lot more data, a lot more dynamic range. They're essentially raw audio files. You'll see that you can also choose high quality MP3s. If you were going to do MP3, you would want to choose the highest quality at 320K, but I don't see any reason you should be doing that. Wave 24 bit, that's all you need. Come back here, go into sample and choose 48K. Any audio used for video should be 48K. If you're doing audio and it's only ever going to be audio, it's never going to be a part of a video. You can choose 44 one, but your best bet is to choose, of course, 48K because the odds are you will end up using this with a video. And if you ever need to go audio only, you can always sample down to a 44 one. Stereo or mono? This is a big question here. Typically, I'm going to leave the DR-05 in stereo mode because when you plug in an on-camera shotgun mic directly to this, like I've got overhead, that's a dual mono anyway, so using stereo isn't going to cause you any problems. But if you're using a mic like, I don't know, the Rode VideoMic NTG, which has a safety track function, that requires a stereo track, so it records louder on one track and quieter on the other in case you ever clip. Something like that, you need it to be set to stereo anyway. The only time you should ever set this to mono is if you're going to use it as a narration voiceover mic, this kind of a thing, you definitely want it set to mono in that case. So mono or stereo really depends on your use case. All right, set the size to the highest it can be. That's for the memory card. Mic power on or off? Well, you need to turn the mic power on if you've plugged in an external microphone, which is here by the way, the external mic in is right here on the top. You'll need to turn mic power on if you're using a microphone that requires mic power or a line in power, camera power, whatever. If you're using a microphone that has its own battery or its own power source, you might not need that on. So turn it on if you're using an external mic that requires mic power, leave it off otherwise. Low cut, we have a few different options. 40 Hertz, 80 Hertz, 120, 220. I would put this on 40 Hertz and leave it there. Most of the time for spoken word, you'd be totally fine with an 80 Hertz low cut because most male voices typically, or any low voices, doesn't have to be male, typically have their fundamental frequency somewhere around 85 to 100 Hertz. There's no reason you can't do that in post-production. It takes half a second to do a low cut in post. So I usually just do the 40 Hertz low cut here in order to get rid of like low end rumble, road noise, background fans, hiss, stuff like that. That's what 40 Hertz is gonna do for you. Pre-record, auto tone, tone seconds, tone volume, mode, level. You can ignore all of those things for standard content creation. That's next level stuff. We don't need to worry about it, you don't need it. Hit the menu button, come back out. Let's look at play settings. You really don't need to worry about any of this. Everything that it's got set here is absolutely fine. If we go to IO settings, level, manual, this is really important. You want your level to be in manual because you want to be able to set the audio level of the recorder. You can change it to limiter, to reduction, to auto. There's all these other options. I would just leave it as manual because I wanna be able to have full control over my audio. If you have no idea what you're doing and you don't wanna learn how to set it, set it to auto. Just know that you're not going to get as good a sound as if you were working in manual. And I've done a tutorial on how to manually set your audio input. I'll put that right up here. Speaker, on or off. That is the speaker that's built into the Tascam DR-05X so that when you hit play on a recording, you can actually hear it. I usually just leave this off because I'm always going to monitor with headphones I'm never gonna use the speaker. This right here on the side is your line out slash headphones you can plug in a standard 3.5 millimeter headphones into here. You could use earbuds, you could use big fancy headphones as long as you've got a 3.5 millimeter, that's your headphone. Play EQ off, level align off, leave all that off. You don't want any of that. Browse, we don't have a card in so we don't need to worry about that. Now USB, this is where the DR-05X gets really interesting. If you go in here, there's two options, the SD card reader, which essentially means you're using a USB connection to the computer to read the micro SD card. So anything you've recorded, you could transfer to the computer via a micro USB cable instead of having to pop out the micro SD card which would be right in here. I don't have one in there right now. As I said, I just started this. So that's where you put your micro SD card. You push it in until it clicks, close this up, no problem. You also see the USB, the micro USB port right here. And if you want to use this as an audio interface, you can. Now, what does it mean to use this as an audio interface? It means that you can actually record audio directly into your computer using the TASCAM as an input output source. So in other words, you can plug this into the computer, you can use this by itself or plug a microphone into the mic jack and pull up recording software on your computer, which could be anything. It could be Audacity. I use PreSonus Studio One, which is kind of high-end professional software. You could use Audio Hijack on a Mac. You could use just QuickTime for audio recording, whatever you record audio into in the computer. And you could just use, you could get the benefit of TASCAM's preamp because the audio preamp in this DR-05 is fantastic. For a unit under a hundred bucks, the preamp is exquisite. I love the preamp in this thing. The light, cheap, plasticky nature of this does not do justice how amazing the preamp in this thing sounds, especially when compared to competing products from other companies. Let's test this out. Oh, and because it's an audio interface, that means you can also, in theory, and I'm gonna test this in a second, you can, in theory, use the headphone jack to monitor all the audio from the computer as well. At the same time, you could hear playback from the computer through this because then the DR-05X becomes the input and output source for audio with your computer. So let's try it. Here, I have a micro USB cable that I'm gonna plug in, that's already plugged into the computer, and I'm going to plug this directly in and choose audio interface by hitting the play button, connect to PC, Mac, yes, sample, 48K, good. And what do we have here? Just connect, play. So right now I am connected to the computer and I'm using the built-in microphones to the DR-05X. Let's just start with that. So if I hit record, I should actually be recording. Yes, this is it. I am currently recording directly into the computer using the microphones built into the TASCAM. So if I wanted to, I could get a cheap foam windscreen here and then I could get in here nice and close and record a voiceover directly into the computer. This is how it sounds going directly into the computer. Let me just try something and make sure I can hear the playback coming straight out of the device. Plug in my headphones right into the headphone jack there. So this is fantastic. I went up and chose the TASCAM DR series as the computer's output. And as soon as I did that, using headphones plugged directly into the DR-05X, I was able to hear the output from the computer, which means this is functioning as a full audio interface. And I gotta tell you, for the price point of this thing, all of these different features, the ability to use it as an audio interface, the portability factor, it's just like the original. I find this truly, truly amazing. I'm just blown away by what this tiny little device can do. And because it's so light, of course, you can carry it almost anywhere. You can mount it almost anywhere. And as you can see, I've just got a simple Velcro strap keeping on the DR-05, which again is the exact same size, weight, everything. And that is how I'm getting the audio right now that I've been capturing for this video itself. So you can mount it almost anywhere, which is really just spectacular. And just for a second, you're hearing me through the inbuilt microphones on the G85, which is about four feet away from me. That's only for a second. I just took the SD card, the micro SD card, out of the DR-05. I took the microphone it was attached to and I moved everything down here. So I've got the Movo VXR10 Pro sitting right here, plugged directly into the DR-05X. And I'm doing that so I can show you how to actually record on this thing. First things first, this microphone requires mic power. So we're gonna go back into our record settings, turn mic power on and come back out. Hit the record button once, which enables record. You can see that we've got meters pegging right there. We've got level. And you're gonna use the left and the right buttons here to change the input level. So we're gonna increase the input level until we're at an input level that we're happy with. I usually shoot for minus nine to minus 12 dB, which you can watch right here on this little meter right there. So that's probably about good for right now. And then if I hit record, now that it's record enabled, hitting record a second time actually records. You are now hearing the sound of the VXR10 Pro going into the DR-05X. And if you need to change the level while you're doing this, you can. And if you are recording, it's always worth using the hold button here. Just press the hold button up. And that way, if you try to press any buttons, it won't let you because the hold is on. That just makes sure that you're never accidentally hitting buttons in the middle of a recording, which is, as a professional, as a content creator, really, really useful, especially if you're gonna stick this in someone's pocket or something like that. Those are all the major ways of using the Tascam DR-05X for content creation. I hope this helps. If it did, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Come back anytime to sound better and level up, and we'll see you again soon.