Welcome, this is your video on recording voice and adding reverb. The first thing to always do is to save your project. Start out by saving it. “Save Project” yes. Notice this warning. This is an Audacity project not an audio file. I know that and that is what I want to do. OK. I will save this in a place that I am reserving for all of my videos. Create a new folder. Let’s call this Audacity composition 4. So I know that all of my Audacity files for composition 4 will be saved in this area. I will be able to go back to that. I will call this Comp4. Very good!
Before you start recording you should monitor your microphone
settings. Mine is pretty good. This is working out well. If it
is not good then you may want to adjust the microphone
settings. If I go up higher, right around this area, it is
pretty good. However, there may be some of you that changing
this microphone here has no effect or help at all.
I am not sure how you make the change on Mac, but you will
need to make the setting change and increase the volume for
your microphone. On PC, however, you need to go to control
panel. In your control panel you will go to a setting called
“Hardware and Sound.” Select that and you want to “manage your
audio devices.” Double click on that and you will get
something that comes up with your sound. Select your
microphone. The microphone that I am using for this recording
is a Samson external microphone. You may be using a microphone
in your computer. Double click on this. Go to levels. This is
where you change your microphone level. You can see up above
that the microphone level is very good. However, if I start
moving it down the volume gets quieter. For me I have to have
it around 80. Then I can have a pretty good microphone level.
Press OK or apply. That should take care of it for you.
OK, good so our microphone levels are fine. I am monitoring
that. We have thet setting here that gives me a microphone
level I like. So let’s start now recording.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
Alright, so it looks like the maximum sound level was above
-12. That should be OK. Let’s listen here to the recording.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
OK, you can see that the high points are right in this
area. OK, I may want it a little louder in which case I can
boost this a bit. You do not want to have a sound track that
is too quiet because then you will have to boost it and that
adds extra sound, background noise. So it is better to have
more volume in the beginning and then back off a little bit if
you need to. Of course we do not want it to go over zero
because that will create distortion.
Now at this point I would encourage you to save what you
have already created in case you want to come back to it
later. Let’s export the audio. We can go ahead and just export
it as a wave file. I will call that Comp4_voice1. Go ahead and
just save that. I am not going to worry about all of this
stuff (labels) here. OK, that is wonderful. Now I have that
saved in case I liked it. As I am starting to work on things I
can come back to it.
Let’s now do what we need to do to create reverberation.
The first thing that we will need to do is to go to tracks,
stereo to mono. What I just did is I created a mono track, a
single track out of the two stereo tracks. Because we are
going to add reverberation it is also a good idea to go to the
end and generate some silence. I will generate 3 seconds of
added silence. So that was my next step.
Now I want to duplicate that track. So I will
duplicate…oops. Go back, control-z. I will select the whole
track by left clicking on this side (title side). Now you can
see that the whole track has blue on it. Now we are going to
duplicate. Now I have a copy of the original mono track. It is
going to be in this copy that we create the reverberation.
Reverberation is an effect. It is the sound you get when you
go into a room and there is a lot of echo. You put this on
voice in particular in order to make it sound a little better,
as if you are in a room rather than dead sounding voice. OK,
I click on reverb here. There are all different settings that
you can experiment with. I am just going to leave it as is.
Click on OK. Did you see that? How the sound file has changed
to add that reverberation?
Let’s have a listen now. I am going to solo this track (top)
here. Let’s listen to the first track without the
reverberation.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
OK, so now let’s solo this track (bottom). Let’s just hear
the second track with reverberation.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
Well you can hear that there was a lot of reverberation
there, probably more than I want. What you typically do in
Audacity is allow the first track—the dry track--and the
second track—the wet track—to play at the same time. Let’s
hear how these two sound when they are mixed together.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
OK, and now that I have the two tracks together I can start
adjusting the amount of reverberation I want. Perhaps I want a
little less reverberation. Then I can go like this:
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
Or I could want a bit more of the reverberation by adding
gain that means making it louder.
“This is a test of my recording, 1, 2, 3, this is a test.”
Now, I want you to notice something here. The monitor
showed that with these two track together they were much
louder. There was more gain. Here is the original monitoring
when we came through the microphone. This is the monitoring
when we had the playback with both tracks together. You have
to watch that it doesn’t get too loud.
OK, let’s say that I am happy with that. (You could also
adjust the other track). The other thing that you could do is
to pan the echo off to one side if you wanted to indicate that
the echo was in one place.
OK, good. So I am happy with my results here. Always save
the project as a new file. My system is to add an underscore
and then give it a unique name. Comp4 is the first version,
Comp4_2 is the next one, Comp4_3 is the next one. I save lots
of files. It is really a good idea to save lots of files.
OK, so I am happy with this now and I am ready to export
the audio. I can save this as a wave file. I can bring this
into my composition 4 project later when I want to add that to
percussion. Or I can have my percussion there (as you will see
later) and record my voice over it.
Very good. So that is the end of this adjusting: changing the volume, recording the voice, and adding reverb.