How to Improve Recording Using Audacity (First Episode)
If you are just a starter on the audio field, who don’t have a huge budget for an expensive but still need decent sound quality, after a bit of post-production, the result will the optimum. We will use Audacity as an illustration. Different programs are going to be slightly different from the features that they have.
Noise is always the issue for every microphone, not just the cheap one. So it’s essential to make the track as clear and as it can be.
Noise Reduction in Audacity
- Select the area that only has the noise.
- Go into “Effect”, then “Noise Removal” and click “Get Noise Profile”.
- Go back and highlight the entire track. And get to “Noise Removal”
- In “Noise Reduction”Find the happy medium like 22. And leave the other effect where they are (sensitivity: -0.16, frequency smoothing: 550, attack/decay time: 0.04).
Even you get rid of background noise and the sound is pretty good now, but we still can’t call it an optimum track. Because without change of volume in different frequency, your voice is still a bit muddy. Especially when there are instruments and other vocals pile on top of each other and compete for the same frequency. So the poor sound quality is not often the issue of the microphone itself. What you can do is to lower or boost the volume of some frequency to highlight the instrument or vocal, so the whole track can be heard clearly.
You would like to increase the volume of high end (over 1 KHz) to add clarity to vocal. If you also have the guitar sound in the track, increase the mid-range frequency (100-1000 Hz) and for the drum kicking. Though of course, when you are doing the broadcast, a bit more bass should help your voice sound good.
It may take you a little while to know exactly what slider to move to get the exact effect you want. This is a bit of trial and error. But you can check out the second episode to find out some conventional settings to optimize recording.