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How to Make YOUR Voice Sound BETTER in 5 Minutes with Adobe Audition (Clean Up Vocals Recording)

Here’s how to make your voice sound better in 5 minutes or less. Today, let’s use Adobe Audition to clean up your vocals, but you can use any other audio app on the marketplace.

How to make your voice sound better

Most of us don’t have a good recording environment, such as a professional studio with top-tier equipment. That’s why you can use this video to improve your recording without any special gear or workspace. Heck, I recorded this video on a 5-dollar microphone in a 2 by 3 boxy bedroom. Not perfect, but definitely good enough.

The biggest problem when you record your voice is that you end up with ugly room and mouth noises. This drastically lowers the quality of your audio. Luckily you can easily fix that in 3 simple steps.

First, open your recording in Adobe Audition by clicking “File”, “Import”, and “File…”. Then find the sample on your disk and click “Open”. Now, let’s get started.

STEP 1: Remove background noise to make your voice sound better

When you record with a microphone, you will always end up with background noise. There’s static noise from equipment and cable connections. But there may also be noises from your room and surroundings, such as fans or moving air.

Background noise is horrible for a high-quality vocal, so you absolutely must get rid of it. The quickest way to do that is with a noise reduction tool. Adobe audition has multiple options, but let’s use the denoiser.

How to clean up vocals

Therefore, click “Effects” in the menu, select “Noise Reduction / Restauration”, and then “DeNoise…” This will bring up a new window.

All you need to do is play your sample and change the “Amount” value until the noise is mostly gone. Although it doesn’t remove the noises your neighbors make at night, this is as easy as it gets. But here’s the catch: don’t overdo it and don’t underdo it.

If you overdo it, your voice may end up watery and somewhat robotic sounding. If you underdo it, you will not remove enough noise. So find a sweet spot where the noise is mostly gone and don’t go any further. This can be somewhere around 50%. Though, it may be a bit higher or lower for you.

When you’re done, press “Apply”, and your voice will be much cleaner.

Okay, one down, two to go.

STEP 2: Remove plosives to make your voice sound better

When you talk, you sometimes say the letters P, B, T, D, K and G. Naturally, these letters result in plosives. Plosives occur when the flow of air from your mouth suddenly stops and then releases. Especially if you have a slurred speech like me.

Unfortunately, your microphone picks these up, and can end up as loud low-frequency spikes in your recording. As you can imagine, this is bad.

To prevent that from happening, an easy hack is to use a pop filter. A pop filter is a shield that reduces the air pressure before it hits the microphone. But if you have a recording without, you still need a way to get rid of these awful plosives. So here’s the trick.

How to clean voice

Simply use an equalizer or filter to remove the lowest frequencies. Thereby, you can use any tool you wish, but let’s use Adobe’s FFT Filter this time.

Hence, click “Effects” in the menu, select “Filter and EQ”, and then “FFT Filter…”

This will be a piece of cake. Simply click on the “Presets” dropdown box and select “Kill The Mic Rumble”. And just like that your plosives will be part of history.

The filter gets rid of the lowest frequencies up until 80 to 100 Hz. Of course, feel free to play around with the frequencies to find what works best for your recording. But once you’re done, press “Apply”, and you’re off to the final step.

Quickly before we do, unfortunately most of you are not subscribed. So, if you like my content and don’t want to miss my best music-making strategies, take one second right now to hit the subscribe button. It would be great to have you onboard.

STEP 3: Remove reverb and mouth clicks to make your voice sound better

When you’re not talking, particular noises may suddenly stand out, such as the reverb of your room or the clicks of your mouth. Yuk! Obviously, you don’t want those to end up in your recording. It’s unprofessional and annoying at best.

That’s why it’s important to silence the recording when needed, making it clean and tight. You can do this seamlessly with a noise gate.

A noise gate can quiet the audio when the volume dips below a certain threshold. So, it gets rid of anything when there’s no voice.

How to clean voice recording?

Therefore, click “Effects” in the menu, select “Amplitude and Compression”, and then “Dynamics…” Alongside some other effects, this will bring up the noise gate in Audition.

Now, make sure to uncheck all effects, except the “AutoGate” by clicking the checkboxes. By default, most AutoGate settings are pretty good. You only have to figure out the “Threshold”.

If the threshold is too low, you may not remove enough noise. But worse, if the threshold is too high, you may actually start to remove some of your voice. So be careful.

That actually makes me wish we could use a noise gate in real life…

So the question is: how do you find the right threshold value? You can of course do this by ear. Playing your sample while changing the Threshold until the noise is gone but not your voice. This will work. But there’s another trick I’d like to share with you.

How to find noise gate threshold?

Click “Window” in the menu and select “Amplitude Statistics”. Go to the screen on the left side and click “Scan”. This will generate a lot of numbers. All you have to look at is the “Average RMS Amplitude”. Then simply use that number for the AutoGate Threshold.

So, go to the AutoGate again and give the Threshold that particular value. Simply press “Apply”, and if all goes well, your recording will be as clean as a whistle and as tight as a drum.

How to make your voice sound better(er)?

Afterwards it can be a good idea to normalize your clip or apply some other effects, such as a de-esser or compressor. If you want to see that in a future video, you have to let me know by leaving a comment.

But right now if you start implementing these 3 easy steps, your voice will sound much better almost instantly.

How to make your song sound better?

If you want your songs to sound awesome as well, make sure to grab my book Mixing EDM Music. You can copy the best mixing tricks and instantly sound like a professional artist. If I can do it, you can do it.

It’s also a great way to support Screech House, but please don’t miss it. So, grab your copy and start straight away.

Mixing EDM Music
Mixing EDM Music

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