Acoustic/Vocal Recording Background Noise

C

coreyschwarz

New member
Hello,

I have a question about recording vocals/acoustic guitars. For some reason I cannot seem to do it without background noise. I have tried various settings with guitar volume and gains in my audio interface and cannot figure it out. I've tried to deaden the room as much as possible. I'll attach a picture as well as an audio clip. Can anyone give me some advice?

Here's what I'm using:
Logic Pro X
U-Phoria UMC204HD Audio Interface
AKG P220 Microphone

View attachment Example 1.mp3
IMG_3426.jpg
 
Hi,
Is it room ambience/reflections or background noise you're worried about?
Can't see much of it but the room looks like worst case scenario. Flat bare walls, minimal furniture, parallel walls...Pretty much everything you don't want.
Maybe there's a better room in the house? Do you have a storage room full of junk, or a room with shitloads of soft furnishings or books or...anything?

You want mass and diffusion so anything dense or cluttered will be better (in some way) than a bare room.

What you're doing in the pic may reduce high end some amount but it won't help at all for the muddy or bassy reflections which are more likely to be the problem.

If it's actual background noise, there has to be a source. What is it?

Hope that's useful.
 
I don't hear background noise, but do hear some pronounced slapback echo. Assuming this room is what you are stuck with, build some bass traps using rockwool that you can use as movable gobos to block sound form getting out, and bouncing back to your mic.
 
You have a noticeable 60Hz (and a bit of 120Hz) hum at only -50dBFS. Not sure how you get that with a capacitor mic, dirty phantom power supply? Right Mark Analyser shows it some 40dB above the noise floor.

Try engaging the HPFilter (bass cut) in the mic and when you have treated the buggery out of the room you will find it a bit "dim". Put some 1/8" hardboard on the floor, shiny side up.

Dave.
 
Manslick said:
Turn down the gain on the input.
Click to expand...

We haven't established if the problem is room ambience or noise within the room, but both would remain the same relative to the guitar/voice, regardless of where the gain is set.

Regardless of what the noise is, the solution is to increase the ratio between the noise and the desired signal.
 
Lots of (too much) low end- sounds like some overload in it as well? Loose the verb (temporarily) to help sort this out, your tone, mic placement, gains and record levels. Are you compressing? That will raise background levels as well.
With that hut you made room noise shouldn't be too bad. Some of it might just be 'you and the guitar's noises.
Start clean' uneffected, then work back from there.
 
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