Zoom Settings for Music Performance - Update 2021

learn stuff, yeah hey, I'm Greg, and today we're going to talk about the

settings

you need to change in

zoom

to make your singing, your guitar, or your DJ event sound the best it can, if you've already tried it, you might have . I noticed that it doesn't sound as good with the default

settings

because the default settings support good clear communication, it's not great for

music

al instruments or

music

al waveforms or whatever, so let's talk about the settings you have to change in order to perform the best sound, best you can on

zoom

, okay, here we are, let's open zoom and make sure we have at least version 5.6.5 or later, let's start a new meeting and there I am, you can see my webcam is on and we have take a look at our audio settings so at the bottom you have video options here and audio options of course we'll keep it muted for now but you can unmute here of course and just to the right there is an arrow pointing up, you can see that.

I have selected my mackie pro effects as a microphone and as a speaker. It's an external USB mixer that I'm using and it makes a big difference in performing and getting a good sound on your computer and off it. I have a video that talks. about that too, if you want, there's probably a card for you to check out here or at the end of the video, but I have the pro effects selected for the microphone and speaker. You may be selecting a webcam or something else. It may have been connected to your computer, but we'll talk about that in another video, let's talk about audio settings, so at the bottom you want to click on the audio settings tab and you can see that you have options to try and You also have the options to change the microphone and speaker options are also here, but the first thing we want to do is turn off the automatic microphone volume.

We don't want the zoom to change the software sensitivity of my microphone. We don't want to do it. I mess with my microphone level or the level when zooming in, we want it to be consistent so we can have dynamics in our music and have quiet moments and loud moments, so turn this off, you don't want it as soon as it's off, right? that? that means now you can select it manually and as you can see if it's down at the bottom I'm not getting anything from my podcaster mic mounted here if I turn it up you can see more levels now if you need the level it's okay to go right to the top , that's not a problem, but you want to make sure that this level is, you know, 75, three quarters of the way up and leave some headroom in case there's a stronger moment so you can adjust it accordingly, but mine is right at the top for this mic and that's probably fine feel free to turn it down but it won't change keep it off you have control of the volume level not the zoom that's important for music number two suppress background noise the processing involved in getting rid of background noise like a heater or a fan or the boiler in your house, whatever you're listening to, that processing will alter the sound of your guitar or your singing voice, it's a bad idea, we want to be lowest possible, they don't allow it. to turn it off completely, but we want it to be at least low and this is what Zoom recommends as a setting for any type of singing or musical

performance

, so set it to low and we'll go from there below. a pretty new edition but with all the music

performance

happening on zoom they've added this in recent versions so let's turn this on show the option in meeting to enable original sound turn it on and this opens up some settings which are great for the musicians. and for high fidelity music, such an original sound will be a button that will appear here now that I have activated it on the call and you will want to remember to activate it every time you are doing a musical performance zoom meeting or Call, so yes, we want a Hi-Fi music mode, definitely echo cancellation, definitely not.

Now there are times when you'll want a high quality music mode and have echo cancellation on, but that's usually when you're not using any kind of special microphone or Basically, if you don't have echo cancellation, you should probably use headphones even if you're just using the built-in microphone on your laptop or your cell phone, which is not ideal, but at least use headphones, so we don't. I don't want to turn echo cancellation on because I have a good quality microphone and some sort of good quality USB or USB mixer interface, so I'll definitely leave echo cancellation off and probably use headphones if I was doing a performance.

With stereo audio, you can do a perfectly good performance with mono, but with stereo audio you'll potentially have a richer sound if you use effects or something, if you could shift the instruments left and right, but that puts a little more pressure. not only on your computer, but on the computer of the people who are listening on the other end, but you can try it and if people and their computers can handle it, great, turn it on, but if you keep it off, it will just be a monkey. performance uh we'll turn it on for now because we're going to play the hell out uh high quality music, turn on all the bells and whistles if we can okay, so that's the bulk of it, one more little thing to look at, you'll see.

At the bottom there is an advanced button, we'll just click on it to look here and you'll see the signal processing using the Windows audio device drivers and there are two options: automatic and on and off and automatic and then echo cancellation on general. The only cancellation options are automatic and aggressive. We definitely don't want aggressive echo cancellation. We will leave it on automatic with the understanding that we have echo cancellation configured to be completely deactivated when we use the original sound mode. I've turned it on, okay, no big deal, but it's nice to leave it on automatic.

Definitely check that he is not aggressive. The latter is signal processing by Windows audio device drivers. This is a relatively new addition. There is some confusion as to what it does per se. I can't give you a definitive use or not use it. I would experiment, but here's the thing if you're using a high quality interface like a mackie pro fx 6 or what's called a focusrite unit or some kind. from an audio interface that is higher quality than just a built in microphone on a laptop, you can definitely consider converting it to raw and see how it works, try it out, call your friend, use a high quality interface like a small mixer um or something like that. that with a USB connector and set it to raw and see if your friend on the other end experiences a quality difference, but leaving it on auto will leave you to zoom in on your choice, try it and see how it works, it's a bit new.

I would try raw. I'm excited to try the raw setting with my mixer to see how it works and if it improves the overall quality, we'll leave it on auto for now, so those are mostly all the settings you need to use zoom for singing. or play music as a DJ or play your guitar or your saxophone, whatever you like, those are the settings, so we'll just come out of that, they're all up and ready to go, we'll close it and then you can look here that you want to activate the original sound. Well, now you'll see again.

There's a little drop-down arrow here where you can select your microphone to always use the original sound. You can do this if you want, but there may be times when you don't. you want to use the original sound if you are just calling your friend or family member you don't want to use the original sound you just want to use the normal mode for conversation so when you are doing a song or performance click on it and it says on. you're performing your singing you're strumming your guitar it won't sound weird anymore your singing will sound better your instruments your music playback will sound better turn it off when you call your friend somewhere else in the world and then any echo you might hear when you're having a conversation is canceled if There is some background noise that can be eliminated and that's what it's for, that's the difference, right?

Are you having a conversation or are you performing music? These are completely different waveforms and we've set it up so you can choose to call your grandma or play on your guitar or do a DJ show or sing whatever, so those are the basic settings. Next is to talk about the types of devices you are using. and how to use hardware, such as microphones, mixers, and headphones, to help you with these settings and, in combination, get the best possible online performance experience for your audience that you can get. Hope that helps if you know you want to subscribe please leave. a comment I love it um uh I love hearing the comments and uh and answering questions and please consider subscribing to greg in the box everything helps until next time learning things yeah