Removing background noise... post-production

Pinky

and The Brain...
I have some hum from computers in the background of a recording last week and I have almost got enough of it removed compressing, eq'ing, and normalizing the tracks with soundforge, but it falls a bit short...

I was wondering what (besides avoiding having humming things anywhere near a really good mic) I can do about this. I also have access to cool edit pro 2.0 if there's a filter I could run to remove the background but keep the guitar content...
 
Noise reduction in CEP may help a little but when severe noise reduction is needed the cure is usually worse than the disease. Rerecord the tracks if you really care about the project.
 
TexRoadkill said:
Noise reduction in CEP may help a little but when severe noise reduction is needed the cure is usually worse than the disease. Rerecord the tracks if you really care about the project.

That's generally good advice, advice I'd be more than happy to take, but I don't own the mic and have already returned it to its owner so I can't re-record this properly, and I am not convinced it can't be fixed... just looking for an experienced member's help if someone's encountered this before.
 
what kind if of mic did you use? and how close was it to the P.C.

I remember when I used to plug my guitar straight into my PC i got a PC monitor hum in my recordings. As far as I remember the hum was confined mostly to a single harmonic (one frequency). Try getting the frequency response for a silent (just the hum) part of your recording, and see where the noise resides. Then you can suppress them for the entire track using a band stop filter. It worked fine for me.
 
There are a variety of noise reduction solutions you can try which range from really cheap to really expensive. On the low end of the scale, a program like Ray Gun goes for under $100. It can be effective in some cases, but don't expect miracles from a low end solution.

High end restoration and repair plug-ins and/or hardware get prohibitively expensive, but it may be feasible to rent a studio that has that kind of gear, especilly if we are only talking about a few songs.

If you can find someone with a Sonic Solutions No Noise system (found in many mastering studios) that would be ideal. Many Pro Tools users own the DINR plug-in (about $800) which can often help quite a bit. There is a new suite of Restoration plug-ins from Waves too.

What I would do is take your audio to a studio and have them demonstrate on a small 10 second clip the effectiveness of whatever system they are using. If you are happy with the results and think it is worth their price, let them do it. Otherwise, keep trying other places with other systems. Somewhere out there is someone that can help.
 
A noise gate is fine during parts where the instrument, vocal isn't playing - for that matter since your in a DAW just manually edit the parts where there is just noise, but no one playing. Easier on CPU and more effective than most computer plug-in gates I've used.

A noise gate is not going to help much with the overall problem. The noise is still present when the instrument is playing. Over a number of tracks, all this noise is cumulative.

Edit out what noise is present when nothing is playing on a particuliar track (via cropping the wave and/or silencing parts between vocal phrases etc). As far as noise reduction, I suppose there are some high tech tools out there that can reduce it, but if it is *that* much of a problem I think your outta luck. The noise reduction may change the sound of the the tracks so much you might end up prefering to leave it alone.
 
chessrock said:
Ever hear of a noise gate?

The background hum/static is audible even when the guitar part is playing, wouldn't work...

I am working on it right now, I think I will have to suffer.

It was a high quality MXR mic (don't know the model, think Marshall made it, can't be sure)... it picked up everything in my living room, I am not used to having to have complete quiet when recording ;).

Thanks for the feedback, I learned a valuable lesson it seems.
 
The Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction plug in works great FOR CONSTANT NOISE. You must have a part of the track(s) where there is noise only. The plug samples the noise and removes only that noise from the track(s). It seems to have little or no effect on the rest of the track. This will NOT obiously work for inconsistent noise (ie a plane flying over in the middle of a track). If it's a fan, or 60 cycles, or some constant noise source, it works very well.
 
MONTE said:
The Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction plug in works great FOR CONSTANT NOISE. You must have a part of the track(s) where there is noise only. The plug samples the noise and removes only that noise from the track(s). It seems to have little or no effect on the rest of the track. This will NOT obiously work for inconsistent noise (ie a plane flying over in the middle of a track). If it's a fan, or 60 cycles, or some constant noise source, it works very well.

Thanks, I don't think I have this plugin, but I'll look around for it tonight :)
 
If the noise is in a narrow isolated frequency, plop it into a scope, find the frequency, and drag it down. If it's isolated enough, you might be able to get by without it.

...just a thought.
 
In case this wasn't clear in my earlier post you do have Noise Reduction in CEP. It works by you defining a region of the file with just the noise in it then it takes out that noise on the areas of the track you pick.

I would try that before buying more stuff.
 
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