Complete BEACN Studio and USB Mic Setup Guide

[00:01] things and I'm still rocking the Beacon Mic and my main setup. We're just jumping into it. Here's how to set up your entire stream audio using the Beacon system. Either the Beacon Studio or the Beacon Mic because they work the

[00:15] or the Beacon Mic because they work the exact same way. Just just managed to do something nobody else has. They they were able to take truly

[00:30] professional audio and redesign it in a way that's easy enough for a beginner to way that's easy enough for a beginner to use it. Things like their impressive EQ, their compression, their expander, which by the way is like the main reason I

[00:43] studied sound engineering in college. That was my major. And the Beacon stuff video in a series of four where I'm walking you through the four most popular streaming audio devices. And in each one of these videos, I'm doing a

[00:57] deep dive into a different element of audio for you to learn. In the last video on the Elgato device, we went really deeply into submixes and why they up. In this video, we're going to go into those super important audio effects

[01:09] that I mentioned earlier, things like EQ, compression, expansion, because to talk about it in this one. The reason I'm splitting this up across the four videos is so that I'm not repeating myself in every single video. So, make

[01:21] them all linked down below. Should make it a little easier on you. Just watch to the Beacon stuff. This is perfect timing, though. Beacon just dropped a huge update. And fortunately, Nick on the team here is actually part of the

[01:33] Nick's going to handle the meat of this video, talking about the interface, how talk about those audio effects later. So, I'll see you in a

[01:46] assume that you already have the software installed. If you don't, pause here. Take care of that. Just make sure if you have any other Beacon devices to follow the onscreen prompts for unplugging and replplugging in those

[01:58] devices like a mix or a mix create if you have them. One quick note, as of May 18th, Beacon released an update that is currently in beta and there are some slight changes to the UI. So if yours looks a little different than mine,

[02:11] there might be an update waiting for you. If it's out of beta, we'll see. A few ground rules to make sure you have the best time Studio is plugged directly into your computer and not going through like a

[02:23] USB hub or switch. Make sure you got your mic plugged into the XLR jack on make sure your headphones are plugged into the headphone jack. The only other part on the Beacon Studio I'll mention is the massive lovely knob. That is both

[02:37] your volume adjustment and push to mute and unmute. With everything plugged in, software installed, behold the Beacon app. As a quick overview, on the left side of the app, this is your navigation bar with each button taking you to a

[02:50] different part of the app. The mixer yet, which is right here, is not enabled a little bit. Right under that is our Beacon Studio, which is broken up into three subtabs. Mic settings, lighting, and then the device settings. Not to be

[03:05] confused with the Beacon app settings, which are more like global and not per device. That's in the bottom left. This main microphone page is kind of separated into four different sections. Top and center is the equalizer, often

[03:20] abbreviated to EQ. This is a realtime representation of the signal that is Beacon Studio, and it's displayed in a waveform. This is where you can manipulate frequencies to alter the sound of your mic. We're not going to

[03:35] dive into that just yet, either. Below the EQ portion is the tabbed menu for all of the effects that are built into the Beacon Studio. Mic setup, noise headphones. One of the things that makes the Beacon Studio and the Beacon Mic

[03:49] unique is the onboard DSP, meaning all of the effects that you can apply to a microphone, they happen on the device as opposed to the CPU in your computer processing the audio. There are many benefits to this. The big one being that

[04:04] mic that you're monitoring in your headphones. But Nicholas, I don't That's yucky. You listen to me. You're going to

[04:16] do it. You're going to like it. You will. You'll learn to like it. I promise. Lastly, on the right side of the app, we're going to work from the bottom up since the top has the most recent changes. Down here is the mic

[04:28] sampler, which lets you record a quick snippet of you talking into your microphone, and then you can make changes to the mic and then hear those changes in real time. The output gain slider is for increasing the volume of

[04:40] effects have been applied. The decibel meter for the mic that you can see profile switcher, which is now a collapsible menu, and you can expand and little What is What is that? A little little guy. little guy in the top right.

[04:57] for myself cuz I use the Beacon Studio, I'm just going to create a new one. And then I can rename it by rightclick and rename senpai. Even though the mixer is currently disabled, I'm just going to

[05:10] While we're at it, before I kick you back to Harris to have him cover all of the microphone effects, I'm going to cover the final tab of the mic setup starting from the left side, this is where you can control how much of your

[05:24] own voice you can hear in your headphones when you're monitoring because you do that. Now, as well as the volume uh of your PC, all of the audio playback from your PC. You can choose to keep these linked so that these levels

[05:37] will both change at the same time or you can unlink them and then just change them individually. You can see if you keep them linked, they change based on a ratio. So, even though one is going only halfway down, the other one is going all

[05:52] the way down. You might have noticed there's also a second EQ. This is just an EQ for the playback audio in your headphones. So, if you have headphones that are a little muddy, you can boost the mids or the highs to bring out that

[06:05] clarity. Or if you tend to have headphones that are a little bit more flat, you can add low-end by increasing the bass or increasing the subwoofer using the slider. This is all to personal preference. Every pair of

[06:17] headphones is going to have a different sound stage. Last but not least, the amp power selection on the right side. So, those of you using IM or in-ear monitors, you'll be pleased to know that there's a setting just for you. Or if

[06:29] you have some beefy headphones, you know, ones that draw a lot of power, uh you can change the amp to high impedance mode and you'll be in heaven. Hey, I'm back. I said I would be. Let's talk about mic effects.

[06:43] Specifically, this area down here. These tabs are all the different effects for your microphone. Let's start with mic setup. Mic setup is just where you set much do you turn up the preamp boosting your voice. This is a very important

[06:56] issues people have are because they set this wrong. Which is why I love what Beacon did with a gain graph instead of a gain meter. If you watched the last sometimes it can be hard to tell if you're getting it just right. Beacon

[07:11] beautiful graph that shows you the signal level of your microphone over time, making it so easy to tell that your microphone is set properly. And you I'm talking, it fits somewhere in this

[07:24] we're looking for. That's how I know I have my mic in properly set. And if it's voice is down here. If it's a little bit too high, it goes all the way up here. Audio actually uses 32-bit float. So, it's very difficult to peak on this

[07:39] microphone, but it looks like 12 dB is about perfect for my voice, right around next tabs, let's actually jump up here to EQ, the next most important setting short for equalization. And let me actually reset this EQ graph before we

[07:54] you put an Instagram filter on a photo to make it pop, except you're doing it frequencies and cutting out certain frequencies, you can brighten up your voice, and you can even thicken up your voice. I'm a big fan of a thick voice.

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[09:01] on own.pro, start adding some cool widgets to your stream today. Now, you the EQ that boosting the low end made the voice thick. Boosting the high-end made the voice a little bit brighter. I I like to give these two areas a 1 and

[09:15] 1/2 to a 2 and 1/2 decel boost. It just makes my voice pop a little bit more. The low frequency I put at around 100 hertz. The high frequency I use a shelf continues up the rest of the way. And I do that around 3500 to 4,000 htz around

[09:29] a dynamic mic, I like to give about a two decel cut right at 500 htz. These microphones, dynamic microphones, tend to be a little bit midheavy, which makes them sound muddy. Cutting a little bit out of there cleans up your voice a

[09:43] little bit. Now, keep in mind, everybody's voice and mic are different. So, what I like to do is add a band, boost it up around 5 to 10 dB, something really extreme, and then while I'm listening to it, sweep left and right

[09:57] and left again. Do it slowly until you can find a spot that just sounds ugly. I'm actually going to use the Q here. That's going to narrow this band to make sounds like. And when I find the

[10:10] frequency that sounds bad, oh, that sounds bad. I'm going to pull this down. Now, that's called a boost, sweep, and cut. And that's actually how a lot of EQ you have your EQ where you like it, I recommend you use the little recording

[10:23] button down here. Record yourself, listen to it back, and make some minor how you make sure you're not overdoing it, making your voice sound overboard with EQ. But that's pretty much the biggest one. The rest of these

[10:37] suppression, I've actually never touched. It's adaptive. It's very great. It cuts out a lot of the extra noise in the background. The expander is like a noise gate, but it's 10 times better. The way a normal noise gate

[10:52] and as soon as your microphone goes down microphone, cutting out all the noise in the background. Now, that does work at you've ever used a noise gate and you've talked too quiet, you get that weird

[11:06] out cuz the noise gate is turning on and there. Now, an expander is a gradual noise gate that works very similarly. You still set the point where the expander kicks in. But if the signal

[11:18] drops below that, instead of cutting it off entirely, it just drops the volume down more heavily, expands that signal down lower. It makes that transition hear it. Now, the compressor I also really like. It works just like any

[11:31] other compressor except they added this attenuation number both in this bar and you should all have the same compression settings. Your ratio should be 4:1. You don't have to touch attack or release. But the thing is, setting the threshold

[11:44] hard, especially when you don't even know what to listen for. So, what I can tell you is what you're looking for is this attenuation to be typically between 5 and 10 dB. So, you just set your ratio at 4:1 here, and then you move this

[11:58] threshold number up and down until your attenuation is kind of sitting between 5 and 10 while you're talking. And that's it. If you notice your output, which your uncompressed voice over here. If you notice a huge discrepancy between

[12:11] adjust the makeup gain to kind of make them match a little bit better. But that's going to be it for audio effects. Back to you, Nick. By default, out of the box, the Beacon Studio is a USB audio interface for inputting your mic

[12:24] into the computer and then playing back your computer audio to your headphones. However, you can unlock it and have it be a digital mixer, giving you virtual channels that you can assign different apps to, control individually, dual

[12:37] output listening devices, and submixing. Now, we're not going to go into submixing in this video. Harris just did a deep dive into submixing in the recent master class for Elgato Wavelink using the Stream Deck Plus with the XLR doc.

[12:51] So, if you want to know more, check out that video. So, the Beacon mixing suite is what you need to enable for this, which can be done by clicking the mixer know, hey, we're going to enable the mixing suite. This is going to add some

[13:03] audio devices. So, we'll just hit enable. This might take a hot second. enable. This might take a hot second. Sometimes it does. Why are you taking

[13:15] suite, we had a limited number of virtual audio devices. You may have seen like microphone, beacon, studio, or you might have seen the link 1 through 4. But now that we have this on, we have a handful of virtual audio channels like

[13:28] system, game, browser, and chat. Once that source is detected, it'll show up rename it, you can double click. And we're going to call Microsoft Edge the best browser because that's what it is. Once

[13:43] the source is detected, you can click to drag and drop that source to any other channel. And the color of the uh source will actually change based on the color Another great thing about this mode is you get two personal listening devices

[13:57] have your headphones that are plugged into the headphone jack on the back of the Beacon Studio, but you have speakers that are plugged into the back of your between those two devices just by pressing and holding the button on the

[14:11] Beacon Studio. What's great about the Beacon ecosystem is if you have a Beacon Mix Create alongside the Beacon Studio, this gives you physical control of those virtual audio devices. So, the knobs control the volume of the channels. You

[14:25] can use the push to mute functions. It's pretty awesome. Little bonus tip for you. If you click on the plus icon in the mixer, you might notice an AX one, AX 2, and hardware. If you have another USB audio device, like an analog mixer

[14:38] that has eight inputs, you can add that USB interface into Beacon as a virtual channel, that means that any audio device that you plug into your computer can be tied into the Beacon mixing suite. You'll have volume control. You

[14:53] can mute that audio. You can route it wherever you want. It's awesome. While dual PC setups are my favorite, we're not covering dual PC in today's video. I do want to mention Beacon Link because it's what makes the Beacon Studio a very

[15:07] unique product and it's why I use it for my dual PC setup. The Beacon Studio is actually a dual USB audio interface, meaning that it can be connected to two different computers at once. The way this works is you choose whichever PC is

[15:20] your main device. The Beacon app runs on that PC, like your gaming PC. The studio then also plugs into a second PC like a streaming PC and then a smaller Beacon app uh called Beacon Link runs on that second computer. That gives you four

[15:35] stereo channels that can go from each PC. So if you were to look in your volume mixer uh you can see uh Beacon Link in and out. The outputs have link 1 through 4 and then the inputs have link 1 through 4. So, this means on your

[15:49] second PC, you can assign apps to different channels and then you can control the volume or the mutes of those apps over on the gaming PC without having to touch the streaming PC at all. It for dual PC setups, it's awesome. If

[16:01] Harris already told you to comment your favorite emoji for engagement, I can't go back in time and undo that. But if you have another emoji to spare and you want a video on dual PC setups using the Beacon Studio, just do a different emoji

[16:14] the two computer content." As I mentioned earlier in the video, Beacon just pushed out a new update that made a few UI changes and also introduced a couple of new features. Some of these very highly requested by the community.

[16:29] I already showed you the profile collapsible drawer on the right side, which is a gift from God. Gives you that sweet, sweet screen real estate back. They've also added hotkey support, which again, very highly requested. Uh, that

[16:43] you can use a hotkey to change mixer profiles, change your personal listening device, mute virtual channels, uh, or change Beacon Studio profiles. This last out personally yet. Uh, but one of the

[16:58] really cool use cases that Drix has told me about. He works for Beacon, also a solid dude. You could use hotkeys to change scenes in OBS as well as change mixer profiles in the Beacon app. And now that they've added crossfading

[17:12] between those profiles, that would mean you would have a smooth transition of fade in or fade out uh instead of having to manually do this uh physically with faders. And that is pretty dope as well.

[17:24] beacon streaming master class. Uh it may have felt a little bit like drinking splitting up really important audio stuff across multiple videos so it's you want to see more of a deep dive into submixes, which you can do on Beacon, I

[17:38] will leave a link to that portion, the timestamp of the Elgato video where I below. And of course, all the Beacon stuff will be linked down below. Those and buy something, it helps the channel out a lot. Thank you very much. The next

[17:50] the Roadcaster and using that for make sure you do so to check out that video. Uh, hit the like button if you're still watching. And as always, happy streaming.