My Shure SM7B sounds bad, help!

Audio Equipment
1

I’m using the focusrite 2i2, cloud lifter and the Shure sm7b.
I’m a total newbie and i want to get a good sounds for podcasting.
Oh and i am also using adobe audition.

I included a video with my settings and you can see those and hear the audio.
Sorry i don’t know a lot about audio and how to set things up so any help will be great!
(English is my second language so if something does not make sense, that is why xd)
Video

2

Try increasing the audio latency in hardware settings.

3

That fixed the clipping, is there any way for it to not pickup the bg noise? I get a lot of static when im not talking

4

Straight away I’m guessing there is a lot of latency so I’d suggest using the 2i2 and direct monitoring from there so you’re hearing yourself in real time. It’s very difficult to record while hearing yourself on delay so direct monitoring would allow you to hear everything in real time and reducing that issue.

I’d also say that the gain is possibly too high as well. Better to record a bit too quiet than a fraction too loud. You can always boost a quieter recording but once you’ve got analogue clipping your audio is basically written off with a repair the best you could achieve.

The background noise is something you need to sort out pre-recording. You should always aim to record in a quiet environment with the lowest noise floor possible. Although the SM7B is a dynamic mic and forgiving to poor acoustics your audio would still be improved by using acoustic sound treatment in your recording space to lessen room reflections.

Finally you may want to consider removing the cloud lifter from your chain and replacing it with a processor such as the dbx286s. This can provide more than enough clean gain for and SM7b as well as allowing for EQ and an expander/gate. Word of warning though, don’t use the expander/gate as a substitute for sorting out the background noise issues as otherwise you’ll have a very unnatural sounding recording where it’s quiet while you’re not speaking but the background noise returns audibly the moment you start speaking.

Hope this helps.

1 Like
5

@markdenholm, great findings and helping people specially on SM7B.
Specially your last paragraph has a lots of hints.

retracing here again:

  1. cloudlifter don’t chain with DBX286S, just DBX286S is enough.
  2. gate i used at very low level. yes expander some people prefer to make sound crispy and clear but i don’t prefer. your natural sound is always good.
  3. As far as external noise is, clean it before recording. for this i used a non-empty room that has lots of curtains. Don’t add noise at very first level and cleaning at later in software.
  4. most important, never use any pre-amp at maximum gain. if true peaks are reaching -15db thats enough. later normalise to -3db.
6

Hi Megupets, I have a Shure mike model MV7, similar to the one you use and in the beginning I struggled with the recording. But I downloaded from Shure the free tool Shureplus Motiv and that was for me the solution. In that tool you can make presets how the mike should react. Try it out and see if this will give you also a constant recording. Works perfect now by me in Audition.

shure settings
shure settings451×927 35.1 KB