Before weighing vinyl's, ahem, good and bad sides, it helps to know how records are made. In brief, an engineer such as Gonsalves receives mixed recordings from the studio or even a band's laptop to master and cut to a lacquer, which is mailed off to be impressed upon the sets of metal stampers which will press hundreds or thousands of PVC pellets into vinyl LPs.
Not every mastering engineering cuts lacquers — lathes haven't been made in decades and are in short supply, which keeps owners like Gonsalves busy — and Gonsalves is often sent digital files to work from rather than the all-analog tape one might expect.
It's a little bit more idiot-proof and a little bit less technical. The analog format allows for artists to transport their music from magnetic tape to LP to your speakers or headphones without the complications of digital conversion. This, ideally, is the closest one can get to what the artist intended — if the artist recorded on tape and sent the reels over to an engineer like Gonsalves to cut a lacquer master from. But whether its origins are digital or analog more on this later , a vinyl disc should have more musical information than an MP3 file — so it should be an improvement on streaming sites such as YouTube or SoundCloud, especially on a good system.
Fighting the loudness wars: Digital music engineering, particularly for radio-bound music, is often marred by a volume arms race, which leads to fatiguing, hyper-compressed songs that squish out the dynamics and textures that give recordings their depth and vitality. Vinyl's volume is dependent on the length of its sides and depth of its grooves, which means an album mastered specifically for the format may have more room to breathe than its strained digital counterpart.
The longer an album, the quieter it gets: Gonsalves played me Interpol's lengthy debut album and a inch Billy Idol single, and the decibel difference — without any distortion creeping in — was remarkable. That warm vinyl sound: "I think this is what people like about it: it pins very closely to the way that human beings hear music organically," Gonsalves said. But analog-to-digital conversion and vice versa has come along quite a bit since the birth of the CD, and Gonsalves says he asks for high-definition, bit files to master from if digital's the option.
Still, as artists and labels hop on the vinyl trend, some new vinyl releases may be mastered from CD-quality audio, not the high-resolution formats audiophiles and folks like Neil Young adore. Is a CD-quality album going to sound more accurate on vinyl than a CD?
Both of these issues can be easily fixed by placing your microphone on a boom arm instead of the default microphone stand. These usually clamp on to your desk or any other surrounding furniture and allow you to keep your mic suspended close to your mouth and off your desk, away from your mouse and keyboard. They will be good enough for your purposes and are a lot shorter than they look, taking up a lot less space than you might imagine.
Things like your computer or laptop, for example. There might, however, be a way to minimize the amount of noise that gets picked up on the recording. Most condenser microphones like the AT come with a cardioid polar pattern by default. If you happen to be using something like a Blue Yeti or HyperX Quadcast, make sure to select the cardioid polar pattern using the physical slider on the mic itself. Doing this will make your voice sound crisp and natural, whereas standing too far away will make you sound echoey and tinny.
Similarly, speaking too close to the microphone is likely to result in distortion and clipping, making your recordings difficult to understand and unpleasant to listen to. This might sound silly at first, but you need to take into account that microphones fall into two categories: top-address microphones and side-address microphones. The former requires you to speak into the top of the microphone like you would sing into a handheld mic during karaoke night , while the latter requires you to talk into the side of the microphone.
The famous Blue Yeti, by far the most popular microphone among YouTubers and Twitch Streamers , is a side address mic, meaning your voice is only going to sound loud, crisp and clear if you talk into the front of it and not into its top. The reason for this is that moving farther away or to the right and left of the microphone might result in weird fluctuations in volume and sound quality which are unpleasant for your audience. We know Audacity isn't the most user friendly software, but we hope this guide managed to help you navigate it!
Good luck making videos and make sure to keep an eye on our blog or subscribe to our YouTube channel for more video editing guides! Next up are the recording and playback controls: These will look familiar to anyone who has ever used a music player before. The red button makes Audacity start recording, while the gray square stops it.
These two sliders control the gain microphone icon and playback volume speakers icon respectively: If you read our previous piece , you already know that setting your microphone gain properly is an essential part of recording. At the top is a list of drop-down menus. The File menu is where you go to save your projects and import and export audio files. Record your audio into Audacity The first step is pretty straightforward. Just hit the red button to start recording your voice over! All of the background noise should now be removed.
We recommend that you play it safe and copy the settings you see in the screenshot. Click OK and listen to your audio again. Add some EQ This next step is going to be very subjective, since it depends a lot on your voice and microphone. Feel free to play around with the curve here and adjust it to your liking. Normalize again to -3 dB The final step in the process is bringing your audio back to a loud enough volume. Using a Noise Gate to remove breathing sounds If you listen to the final recording again, you might have the displeasure of discovering that despite the noise reduction we applied in the first step, you can still hear yourself breathing loudly between sentences.
Not everyone will have this problem, but if you do run into it, there is a way to fix it! You should end up with a file called Noisegate. Navigate to your Audacity install folder, go to Plug-Ins and paste Noisegate. In my example, my breathing reaches around dB. This menu will pop up: A noise gate analyzes the volume of all of the sounds in your recording.
In our case, we want to set the Gate Threshold to dB. Leave the other settings at their default value. I usually choose to export my files in the.
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