Trying to work out best way to approach audio quality

[clever storm]

As per the title, I'm not sure if the audio for this sounds sus, or if I can't tell because I dislike having to listen to my voice back! Something I know everyone hates, but it always gets amplified by the joys of Gender Weirdness, so its probably the biggest challenge I'm finding w/r/t making videos (that and of course the fear that it all leads to nobody watching it ever haha). But I digress.

There's a link here to google drive for an MP3 of my latest script; I'm not super interested in feedback on the content, or the quirks of my voice that I know make some words sound weird (you'll notice this specifically in a section on Sayonara Wild Hearts!), but instead about the sort of quality of the audio itself. I'm using a FIFINE USB mic and recording straight into Audacity; have taken the noise profile and done noise reduction to take out some ambient noise, added some EQ changes (a bit more bass and treble), and the Lead Vocalist compressor.

Link is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aWMzGgnppzdmuQL-DHs6rZee4shFTphs/view?usp=drive_link

[signal oak]

Okay, so this is unfortunately a tough one because the mic is just not very good but I tried to get it to sound a little more natural.

The most important part is that you need to boost around 140 Hz by quite a lot. I added about 7.6db of gain there in an Equalizer (I'll add a screenshot below of my processing). This makes it sound warmer and not as thin.

Next, you also need to cut a lot at around 8.2khz. I cut by about 7db there because the audio is too harsh. I did another cut in a second EQ (might be hard to do in audacity, but maybe you could do that in the editing software afterwards), where I cut about 2.8db at around 6.4 khz.

Then I also added a compressor afterwards, (see the settings in the added screenshot).

Here's a processed snippet, so that you can hear the changes:

I don't know the equalizer in audacity unfortunately, so I did this in ableton live. Do you use Davinci Resolve? Because then the equalizer would look roughly the same there

Also bear in mind that my processing is obviously after the processing you already added. I would probably do some things differently to the raw audio.

[clever storm]

I did wonder how much the mic would just be a problem/limitation! and I’m not running davinci (my cpu can’t run it, which is annoying because when I was getting advice for building it was w video editing in mind but oh well!) so I’ll have to try and tinker a little with the settings in audacity to see what I can do.

Also thin was the word I was looking for for how I didn’t want it to sound!

[signal oak]

okay, hmmm... so there are free plugins you could add to audacity that would give you roughly the same interface as my equalizers have. there is this free plugin bundle by "meldaproductions", which includes a good equalizer that is much better than what is included in audacity. you can get that here: https://www.meldaproduction.com/MFreeFxBundle

there are also a bunch of other effects included but you won't really need them but it's the best free one I could find 😅 you can add the plugins the same way you add other effects to an audio track in audacity, they will just be under the folder "VST3". the plugin is called MEqualizer

the processing would then look like that roughly

Alternatively, you could also get reaeq, it's another good free equalizer and also comes in a bundle, but with much less other plugins haha, you can get that here: https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/

it would look like this then. it's a little easier to understand for a beginner because it doesn't look so overwhelming imo

[clever storm]

Thanks for this, I’ll check it out and tinker a little! Other than a better mic, are there any other like, obvious things I’m missing that I could do try and improve the quality of it?

[signal oak]

none that I could really think of right now. well, aside from recording in a room that doesn't have much echo. but I don't think your recording sounded like you were sitting in a relatively empty room, so that should be fine

[clever storm]

Yeah I’m just in my room which is relatively small! I was looking at a couple of mics around like £40-50 and was looking at HyperX DuoCast and a Blue Snowball Ice since they seem to be decent for the money based on some research but I’m very much out of my element here!

[signal oak]

the best you can probably do is listening to some comparisons on youtube and hope that the people in the videos are genuine in their comparisons 😅 and then see which sound like the most. I don't know those mics unfortunately. All I can say, is that I'd stay far away from any sudotack usb mics. I used one for the longest time and that thing was very annoying to use.