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Outboard Gear - The DBX 286s

Lesson 27 from: Audio Production: Record Better Audio

Tomas George

Outboard Gear - The DBX 286s

Lesson 27 from: Audio Production: Record Better Audio

Tomas George

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Lesson Info

27. Outboard Gear - The DBX 286s

<b>In this lesson, we will show you a piece of outboard gear for recording audio and explain the basics of how to use it.</b>
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Lesson Info

Outboard Gear - The DBX 286s

In this lecture, I want to talk about a microphone, preamp and processor. So this is a piece of outboard gear that can be used to actually process and change and affect your voice before it's even recorded. So the signal goes from the microphone into this preamp processor and then into your audio interface and then recorded in your daw such as logic pro. So this allows you to actually mix your microphone before it's recorded. So this can be very useful for situations such as live streaming where you obviously can't mix your audio. This can also be useful for people who don't mix the audio for creators who want to have the audio mixed just to save time, effort and energy. So I've got a video here of my friend Sonny who is an animator. He creates tutorials about animation and he uses this mic preamp processor just so he doesn't have to mix the audio because he's not an audio engineer and he just wants his audio to sound as good as possible without mixing. So I'm going to walk through the...

settings he uses so his audio can be mixed before it's recorded. So I'm going to show you on screen. Now the settings we use for this preamp just in case this is something that you might want to think about, especially for situations such as live streaming. I do personally prefer mixing my audio in post. I do think I can get it sounding slightly better than through this preamp. However, for situations such as live streaming, I do think this is an amazing bit of gear. So let's have a listen to this. So as I was going into the four, as I was going into the four subjects, motion design is in between graphic design, special effects and here is the preamp bypass. This is what his audio sound like before I personally like to think of motion design as two separate parts. So obviously, we have, you can hear there's a lot of gain so we have input gain here, think of design as like the graphic design and the special effects, some microphones might not provide that much gain such as re 20. So this could add gain. We also have a compressor part of Martian design is much more so we can adjust the drive and also the density of the compressor. It's the sort of things that we don't really have an opinion on. It's kind of how we think we also have a high pass filter, the graphic design. And here again is the preamp bypass. So this is the original signal of the microphone. We see how we see things, how we like certain colors, we might like certain fonts. Like let's just adjust the density again. Maybe Gotham and maybe you want to clean up the curing and graphic side of motion design or should I say the motion design side, should I say? So you can really drive this compressor if you want a more radio sounding voice, how um going along, we have a DS A where we can adjust the frequency. Also the threshold. A number eight sign a number eight motion. Obviously, that's quite an extreme setting. So let's just reduce this number eight. You wouldn't have an opinion on it. You wouldn't have a thought on it because there was nothing for you to see for you to be able to see something for you to have an opinion on something. Then we have an enhancer which is similar to EQ you have a low frequency enhancer motion is the number one thing the human brain sees above everything else. The number two thing the human brain sees is lighting and brightness. We also have a high frequency enhancer. Cinema unless you say there's a slight little light on it on the cinema screen and everything else is black, your eyes would immediately look at that. And the third thing, the faces going along, we have a gate sorry and the fourth. So let's just adjust the threshold here, eyes on a picture or on a screen and then we'll look at that face is something that we always tend. Also the ratio. Obviously, this is quite an extreme gate setting. Let's just dial it back to bring some of the audio for a G. We're actually recording this in quite a noisy room. So this gate is very handy because there's a sound of his computer. You can actually hear the sound of a road and there's also the output, go listen to something like this. There's an audio stuff like this. So um let's get back to the um unconscious side, which is the animation. And then I like to think of it as if design and special effects were like the clothes that you wear motion design, the actual motion part will kind of be like how to turn the lights on in the room. So obviously you wouldn't be. So this was the microphone, what it sounded like before we went through this preamp, you need to have the lights on in the room to kind of show you off. And that's how I think of motion design. So this is just a really handy way to add some processing to your audio before it's actually recorded. So if you want to do live streams or kind of a shortcut in recording audio, this mic preamp process is very useful. Like I said, I do think you can get a better sound overall if you mix your audio in a digital audio workstation such as logic pro however, this is a great alternative. So I do recommend having a look at it, especially for situations where you can't mix your audio, where it's streamed out live, such as live streaming podcast, youtube live, that kind of thing. So thank you for watching this lecture. I hope you found it useful and I'll see you in the next one.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

1._My_Recommended_Budget_Audio_Recording_Setup.pdf
2._Microphones_for_Video_and_Film_Makers.pdf
3._Different_Microphones_and_their_uses.pdf
4._Microphone_Accessories.pdf
7._Audio_Interfaces_and_Examples.pdf
11._My_Recommended_Audio_Travel_Gear.pdf
17._Downloadable_Audio_Examples_Used_in_this_Lecture.zip
20._Noisy_Audio_Example_for_Noise_Gate_+_Noise_Reduction_Effect.wav
23._Downloadable_Audio_Examples.zip

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