what are the right settings to removing noise.

[blacksnow]

hi . every time i try to remove noise and hissing from the vocals. they end up sounding distorted. i know it has to do with getting the settings right but i don't know how. like for noice reduction and hiss removal. help.

[mattr]

The answer is to not have the hiss in the first place.

What is your current signal chain?

[J-Lane]

Originally Posted by mattr

The answer is to not have the hiss in the first place.

What is your current signal chain?

Agreed. However if you cannot re-record for some reason the best way I have found is to select a section of the recorded track that has nothing but the hiss sound (no vocals or instruments) you are trying to remove. Use this as your noise sample and then select the entire track and apply the filter to remove the noise. Don't have the effect turned up all the way though because you will find it affects the high frequencies in a very bad way. Good luck.

[Mortonman]

Experiment with the percent of the noise reduction. Once you have extablished the noise profile from a quiet portion of your track, try reducing the rest of the track's noise by 40%, then 50%, and so on until you get the effect you want without any of those weird alterations of the higher frequencies.

[lpdeluxe]

That's it: there's no single setting. Every time I have noise issues (lecture recorded in front of an audience, hum from a guitar amp, whatever) I spend a lot of time tweaking the settings, and changing each parameter while I listen for changes in the tonality, intelligibility, or other important elements. Sometimes I use a lot less noise reduction than I think is called for to achieve a "quiet" recording, because otherwise part of the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.

[Grafolicious]

For my way of just removing noise without it bothering the hiss is:

You highlight a little bit of the beginning where there is no noise that YOU'RE making at all, capture that noise reduction Then there should be some lines
Then after you capture it. highlight your whole recording and go back to Noise Reduction
and make sure you have Remove Noise Checked. I have my Noise Reduction Level set at 95%

[mattr]

Ok, that's 4 people who have recommended using rubbishy "noise reduction", compared to my obviously ludicrous suggestion of removing the noise from your signal chain to begin with. Am I going crazy?

[lpdeluxe]

Originally Posted by mattr

Ok, that's 4 people who have recommended using rubbishy "noise reduction", compared to my obviously ludicrous suggestion of removing the noise from your signal chain to begin with. Am I going crazy?

Not at all...but (using my example) good luck with that in recording a lecture in the local Unity Church. There's a tubby room sound, squeaks from folding chairs, you name it.

Feel free to come by with a horse whip for those persons who dare to cough.

[mattr]

The OP was asking about hiss, not 'background noise'.

Originally Posted by lpdeluxe

Not at all...but (using my example) good luck with that in recording a lecture in the local Unity Church. There's a tubby room sound, squeaks from folding chairs, you name it.

Feel free to come by with a horse whip for those persons who dare to cough.

I'm assuming you are recording with room mics in order for these things to pose a problem. How about handheld, lavalier or headset mics? Again, the results will be much better if you fix it at the source.

[iownrocknroll]

Don't record hiss, hum, buzz, snaps, crackles or pops.

If it can't be avoided, check the IzotopeRX

[lpdeluxe]

Originally Posted by mattr

The OP was asking about hiss, not 'background noise'.




I'm assuming you are recording with room mics in order for these things to pose a problem. How about handheld, lavalier or headset mics? Again, the results will be much better if you fix it at the source.

Yes, and platitudes are by far the best tools for recording. Sorry, there are times when you have no control over the details, but good results are required. Noise reduction is useful, in combination with high-pass filters, notch filters and many other tools. "Problems should be fixed at the source" is a nice epigram to offer to people who have no experience, but I record on an actual planet. Those times when I have the necessary control (as in my studio) noise is not a problem because I know what steps to take when noise arises. And the action I take is NOT "fix the problem at the source." That's meaningless. What I do is hands-on tweaking of many different sorts to ensure that the area is noise-free, at least as far as it ever can be.

So the real problem with your advice is that it offers nothing. If you were to provide strategies to a beginner on how he can "fix it at the source" you would be doing him (or her, no sexism intended) a favor, larger or smaller depending upon your own expertise and his (or her) talent for implementing it. You haven't yet achieved that.

But the difficulty in assigning settings to unknown noise on an existing recording is that the range of possible problems is vast. Luckily, the software tools available are powerful and adaptive; even so, there are situations where you must trade that last increment of noise reduction for intelligibility or musicality.

Unless I have recorded in a well-treated room, I generally run each track through a high pass filter set just below the lowest "desired" frequency content in the track, to get rid of boominess from the room, which will make your recording sound tubby [and don't tell me, "always record in a properly treated room"].

Then, with the noise reduction program in Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition, always begin with a "quiet" segment where no transients were recorded; sample that, and then use the "%" setting to get rid of as much noise as possible while retaining as much tonality as you can.
This often requires a rather lower setting than you think, and can be influenced by the busy-ness of the arrangement and other factors.

I prefer to do all this before tweaking the EQ of a track, because some of the EQ will be undone by the NR if you're not careful.

Later versions of AA (1.5?) have a nifty lasso tool that allows you to find transients (audience coughs, for example) in spectral view, drawing around them, and clicking on "Fix one click" (or something similar -- I'm not at my recording computer); the software clones the audio around the noise and makes it "sort of" disappear. If it worked perfectly, you'd never hear a cough on a concert recording! But used sparingly, it will help.

Good luck. Do a little at a time and don't commit to the NR track until you have satisfied yourself that you have preserved everything important.

[mattr]

I think you're taking what I said far too deeply, almost as an insult.

You may be an expert at removing coughs, room noise, etc. I'm not disputing that and by all means carry on doing what works for you.

But the OP was asking about removing hiss.

Even the cheapest of basic signal chains made from cheap consumer gear (i.e. basic mic -> basic interface) nowadays are very quiet, especially compared with older digital gear and analog gear. If you experience hiss in such a setup, you are either using it very badly, or its a problem with your gear or choice of gear.

So I posed the statement hoping for some elaboration from the OP about their signal chain, how they were recording, etc, hoping it could either be something to be fixed in their technique (gain structure, possibly) or a simple gear upgrade (maybe bad preamps in a cheap mixer). If you scroll back up to my first post, I did ask them what their signal chain was, but never got a response.

I don't think that would be pointless advice. Unfortunately with some questions you have to be blunt to make the point that there's more to it than botch fixes and software magic.

I've recorded live many times. If the room is bad I use spot mics and keep any room mics down in the mix. Its no substitute for good acoustics, but it means that the room sound is less prominent.

...I generally run each track through a high pass filter set just below the lowest "desired" frequency content in the track...

I always do that. Its just a general part of mixing for most people.

Coughing? Clapping? Shuffling around? The chinking of glasses? Quiet murmur? I've recorded stuff with all that in it, and what do I do? Keep it in there. Its part of the atmosphere right? Live music is allowed to have an audience.

As for spoken word, that is something I have no experience with and don't pretend to. In that situation then yes, I guess it would be preferable to remove coughs, etc. I hate to say it though but most people here are more interested in recording music than lectures. Not to belittle what you are talking about, but don't you agree there are some differences between the requirements of the two?


But please please please realise, this thread was created about hiss! Not background noise! Not room acoustics! And I stand by my statement that noise removal (unless its for an absolutely unreproducible, once-in-a-lifetime recording) is no substitute for not having the hiss in the first place. You can't say you would be happy with a noisy signal chain because you can 'fix it in the mix'?