Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up and Using Your Blue Yeti Microphone (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi guys, Jacob here. Today I'm going to show you how to set up your Blue Yeti microphone. Starting out, you want to make sure you've downloaded any software that you'll need for the Blue Yeti to work with your computer. So there could be a driver or something like that, so be sure to check the product page for your microphone before you get started. Once you have any software downloaded and installed on your computer, whether it's a driver or something like that, you can go into your sound preferences and select the Blue Yeti mic. That's the first thing you're going to do. You're also going to want to use the mic with other software like a DAW or maybe something like OBS if you want to stream or record. I'm actually using OBS Studio right now and show you in preferences, very similar to the computer preferences in audio, I've got Yeti stereo microphone selected under mic. And you can see that I am actually screen recording right now and you can see the levels going there and mic. So that's very easy. Now for my computer, I didn't have to install any extra software or anything. When I plugged it in, OBS saw it immediately, the Mac saw it, it was there in system preferences and sound. It's really a plug and play type situation so it's very easy to get started. A really useful resource for getting started is the quick start guide, which I've already got up here. You can see here it gives you an image to show you how you should actually speak or sing or play into the mic. You don't want to sing straight into it like that. It's not made for that. You want to sing from the side or speak from the side. With this mic, there is obviously a way that it's meant to be used, but ultimately just experiment, use your ears. You're going to want to play around with the distance from you. The physical space you're in will affect how it sounds. Also the polar pattern will heavily affect that, which I'm going to talk about in just a second. You have a simple set of controls on the mic itself. On the front, you've got a mute button, you've got volume under that, and the headphone jack for that volume that that goes with is underneath, so that's if you want to actually monitor what's going into the microphone directly, you can do that. On the back, there's two knobs, one for input gain and one to change the polar pattern. You get four polar patterns with this microphone, and you can see in the quick start guide, there's a nice diagram of each one of those. Stereo, which uses both the left and right channels, gives you that stereo image. Then there's omnidirectional, which picks up sound equally from all sides of the microphone. This is going to be good when you want to get that being there kind of sound. You want the ambiance of a room. Maybe you're recording a live band or a meeting with a lot of people in the room, and you want to just stick a mic in the center. It could be really good for that. The next pattern is cardioid, which is perfect for, well, a lot of things. If you're going to be singing into the mic, obviously you'd be turning it around, singing this way in this direction at the logo on the front. You could be using it for podcasting, streaming, basically anything where you just want to pick up from one side directly at the source. And last, there's bidirectional, which records from the front and back of the mic only. This could be really good, say, if you're doing a duet. It's almost like having one microphone on both sources, but you're picking up the room as well, and you can do it all in one take, all with one mic. And that's it. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, click here for more videos like this one, and go to Sweetwater.com for all of your music instrument and pro audio needs.